[Gottlieb]
Heavy steps echo out around him from all sides, their resonance traveling down the labyrinth as Gottlieb walks, going out of his way to make his presence heard within the halls of the maze as he walks.
He looks around himself. This entire area simply hadn’t existed before, as far as he knows. It’s as if a new section of the station had just… appeared out of thin air. Well, out of thin void. They’re in space, after all. In all likelihood, this is likely due to the same forces that made the station begin filling up with monsters.
Gottlieb stops, rubbing his chin, as he looks around the area, wondering what else could appear.
If the room and monsters can be created by the forces of nature and also by Kai, then couldn’t they just create the crystals that they need from the planet?
Apparently not.
In all likelihood, just as there were physical laws that governed the world in his old life, in this new one there are certainly magic laws that control specific happenings relating to the universe here. Although, he wouldn’t really know where those begin and end. It might be worth looking into in the library. For sure, scholars on the planet have been researching this topic deeply for a time. In fact, in all likelihood, Kai is probably already ahead of the game, having done just that.
Reading a few books isn’t exactly a difficult task for an artificial intelligence.
The man lifts his gaze, scanning the ceiling for a blue light in the darkness, but finds no such thing. Although he would have been surprised if he did, After all, the power is out.
He looks to the left, staring down a corridor, and then towards the right, looking at another path.
Not seeing any discernible difference, he picks one at random and keeps going.
The man turns around, looking behind himself.
The others are probably going to be fine until he gets back. They’re all functional, mature creatures, right?
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[Auxiliary Gunner Grunheide]
Slimes conduct electricity.
Grunheide stares down at her scribbles, made on a digital tablet. The numbers all seem to work out. It’s true that the station’s gun isn’t currently operational until the sun returns. But by filling some conduits with some slime bio-material, they can replace the burnt through wiring.
Depending on what the slime has been fed, the electrical transfer rate could, in theory, be made even stronger.
— The floor panel in the back shakes.
She and Blauhausen turn their heads, looking at the hatch, where the large slime is still trapped.
They’ve been feeding it with nutri-rations. The human-god told them to just let it starve, calling it a self-solving problem, but it seems like a waste of resources, doesn’t it?
Grunheide turns her head, looking at Blauhausen. “Hey, I have a job for you,” says the goblin.
Blauhausen looks at her and then points to herself. Grunheide nods and looks back towards the controls of the gun.
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[Gottlieb]
Gottlieb stops, listening to the sound of heavy, dense breathing filling the air, lingering together with a smell that he can only describe as being distinctly… farm-like.
The man looks around himself.
Getting hydroponics back in working order is of the highest priority, next to solving the whole ‘dying sun’ problem. Although, one of these problems is on a solvable human scale and the other one really isn’t. They need hydro for food and water, obviously. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was just him, but he has mouths to feed now.
Something moves a few walls away.
He turns his head, listening to the heavy thudding of hooves against metal as some great beast, presumably violently muscularly hairy and wild, lumbers through the station.
— A counterpart to himself, who he would describe as being much the same.
Gottlieb turns and follows the sounds as best he can, silently wandering after it.
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[Orbital Maintenance Crew-Member Blauhausen]
Blauhausen bends over, lying on the floor of the station on her stomach. The space-suit shell that she’s in quivers and wobbles as her jelly-like body slushes around inside of it, as she looks through the front visor of the helmet and down into the hole behind the desk where Papa and Grun always sit.
There, down below in the hole, she sees a long, rectangular hallway. At the end of it, a large, gooey mass sits.
She tilts her head, looking at it.
It’s quite a large thing, and it seems rather unhappy, which she can understand. She wouldn’t want to be stuck down here either. But it’s for a good reason. The slime wants to eat Papa, which she obviously doesn’t want it to do.
Grunheide hands her a metal water flask.
The ooze slides down the wall, flowing out of her suit so that she can quietly drip through the crevices in the wall and floor. Slimes, unlike oozes, usually don’t have eyes, depending on their species. They sense their prey through vibrations. But with the station always vibrating because of the electricity and the machinery, the slime is likely triggered to hunt because of its instincts at all times.
Gently flowing across the hallway, she extends the metal flask outward and gets ready to grab a batch of it and then run.
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[Gottlieb]
He stomps down the corridor, moving at a constant, steady pace as he listens to the sounds of breathing coming from all around him, together with the sounds of water. Hydroponics must be close by. The air is dank and heavy, and there is a warmth in the air.
After a few hours of wandering the labyrinth, Gottlieb rounds a corner and finds himself in hydroponics.
The room looks exactly as he remembers it being. There are the basins with the plants, water, and fish, and the one robot that’s left. The other one is still out in the gunner’s bay after Kai hijacked it.
The heavy thud of his boots coming to a stop echoes out around the room that he looks around.
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[Grunheide]
Grunheide waits, standing behind Blauhausen’s suit, holding onto her flat, emptied out legs.
— Something clacks behind her.
The goblin turns her head, looking at the harpy, clicking with her mouth, and cautiously approaching, her head twitching around from side to side as she watches them.
Grunheide shakes her head, holding a finger to her mouth to gesture for Rotwald to stay quiet.
Rotwald bobs her head, clearly not understanding the delicate nature of the situation.
The harpy holds her wings out and leans in.
“SCRAW!” shrieks the bird-creature.
— Down below, there is a loud crashing as metal strikes against metal. The lid on the other side of the shaft crashes downward as the slime moves.
Grunheide jumps across the platform, grabbing the metal lid to the hole and lifts it up, getting ready to drop it down over the opening.
A metal flask flies out of the hole, and then a second later, the floppy space suit refills itself.
She drops the lid down, throwing herself on top of it, and then immediately flies up into the air a few feet as the slime crashes against the metal plate, pressing it upward. She lands back down on top of it, the wind getting knocked out of her.
Blauhausen, back in the suit, flops over like a worm in the rain.
The two of them push the hatch back down, sealing the slime back into its confinement.
She sighs in relief as the metal flask rolls across the floor towards her, sealed and full of the slime goo that they need.
— A curious talon pokes at the flask.
“Wait, no!” says Grunheide, jumping up to snatch the bottle. Seeing her make a move for it, the harpy instinctively snatches the shiny, pretty thing with a long taloned foot and shoots off into the air. “Come back!” yells the goblin, running after her as she flies off.
“Grun!” calls Blauhausen, still holding the hatch down by herself. Grunheide stops, halfway in mid-run already, looking back at her and then at the harpy, landing up at geo-spatial with the bottle.
“Stay there!” says the goblin, gesturing to her and then running off as the slime smashes against the hatch from below, sending the ooze-filled suit rippling. “Be right back!”
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[Gottlieb]
Gottlieb wanders through hydroponics, looking around the area. There are scrawls all over the metal walls, in the same handwriting as by the entrance to the labyrinth, where a warning of the minotaur was proclaimed.
However, the texts here seem to be more… entries in a diary?
Confused, Gottlieb looks at an intricate drawing of the labyrinth scratched into the wall, with a clear path marked out to the exit, and then over to the texts scrawled into the metal.
‘Dear, diary. Today, I was alive.’
He turns to another one.
‘Dear, diary. Today, I got lost. But I found my way back. I heard something. I am not alone.’
Gottlieb scratches his head.
‘Dear, diary. There is a monster somewhere outside the door. I can hear it stomping around when it’s dark.’
— Something rattles across the room. Gottlieb turns his head, looking at the single metal cabinet that is in hydroponics. It’s a little closet cabinet, used to store some tools and buckets and things like that.
Confused, he walks towards it and grabs the handles to the cabinet doors. Then, after a second of mental preparation, he yanks them open.
A blood curdling scream fills the air.
Pressing himself back against the wall, hiding in the closet is… the minotaur.
— He charges out, flailing wildly with his noodly, fur covered arms as he tries to panic-fight his way past him.
Gottlieb looks down at the snot-crying, struggling monster and sighs, his adrenaline crashing to rock bottom. He was really looking forward to this fight too… All of these muscles, and he never gets a chance to use them except for indirectly making himself smarter. What a waste.
He looks over at the map, which is drawn on the wall. It’s pretty good, actually. Better than anything he could draw.
The rather nonthreatening minotaur manages to coordinate himself well enough to stop his flailing and then runs past him. Gottlieb watches as he trips over a small cart, tumbling forward and landing head first into a basin full of water, his hooved legs hanging out in the air.
Gottlieb shrugs, deciding to roll with the punches that life has to throw him.
He walks over to the monster, yanks him out of the water, and hoists the screaming, quarter-drowned creature, as large as himself, over his shoulder without any issues. He screams and tries to get away, avoiding his horrific kidnapping.
“Settle down,” says Gottlieb, walking back into the labyrinth with his prisoner over his shoulder. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he explains, as the man screams his lungs out while they vanish into the darkness. “I’m going to give you gainful employment,” clarifies Gottlieb.
He screams even louder than before.
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He returns to the gunner’s bay, looking around himself at the mess that he certainly didn’t leave behind.
Slime is everywhere. It’s dripping from the ceiling. It’s coating the floors. It’s smeared over the walls and the cables. The man stops, looking around the area, and then over to three creatures, who, visually, look like they have a very interesting story to tell. Grunheide is covered from head to toe in green slime, as is Rotwald, the two of them are connected to one another by strands of goo. The ooze, Blauhausen, is stuck with her back against the wall, her suit being glued to it by dry, crusted slime.
They all turn to look at him.
“I’m back,” says Gottlieb.
“Papa!” calls Blauhausen from up on the wall.
He lifts a hand, waving to her. “Everyone, meet strategic coordinator Braungrube,” explains Gottlieb, only noticing now that the minotaur has gone quiet.
“Is he dead?” asks Grunheide, wiping the slime off of her face.
Gottlieb shakes his head, setting the unconscious minotaur down on a staircase as he goes to pry Blauhausen off the wall. “Worse,” he explains. “He has a desk job,” says the man. “What the hell happened here?” he asks, looking at the two of them as he holds Blauhausen beneath her arms, pulling her off of the wall. She flops around him, covering him in slime.
Grunheide lifts an open bottle. “We can fix the electrical system with this,” she explains, yanking the bottle to the side to get it out of the reach of the harpy, who was already starting to click excitedly, reaching for it a second time.
“Great work,” says Gottlieb, carrying his daughter back to his desk. “Clean this place up and then we’ll get it done,” he orders, looking up at the gun to make sure they didn’t get any goo on his prized treasure.
But she seems fine.
Good.
Everything is good.