You and Mouse both stand over the downed Hex ray, looking up at the nearby building. “So, you don't know this place?” It's not really a question, but Mouse makes an affirmative sound anyway. “Should we check it out?” That's a harder one.
“I... I don't know.” Her Arctic Fox slowly looks up and down the building one more time, taking it in. It's obviously sized for huge machines, like ray frames. The door in the front is large enough for you to fit through easily. “There's no telling what's inside. Boa might have flushed them out, or we might hit a whole mess of Hex in there.”
Tendou's eyes narrow. “Why do I hear a 'but' coming...?” You're uncertain if you're actually supposed to send that one across comms, so you ask, and he nods.
After another conflicted sigh, Mouse says, “But. If the place hasn't been raided yet, it might have some serious valuables inside. Finders keepers. No wonder Boa was being cagey, if he hadn't messed up, he might've been able to strip the whole place without anyone knowing a thing. It could be worth a fortune.”
“A gamble, huh...” Tendou frowns deeply. He closes comms, then asks, “Is this worth it? We only got sent to find Boa, and we already did that and more.”
By my consideration, this mission is primarily to prove ourselves as valuable to Shado. Since we've gotten to the bottom of what brought Boa here in the first place, we may be able to return with the information that there is a facility here to look into.
Therefore, keeping the information secret might offer a potential for personal profit, but negatively impact our standing in Shado.
Of course, I can't tell you which would be preferable. That is a decision for you pilots, and largely depends on exactly what is inside the facility – whether it truly is as valuable as Mouse assumes.
It's a lengthy message, one of the longest you've sent in one shot, and Tendou considers it at length. Right until Mouse comes back over comms. “Uhh, Strider? You there?” she asks, since he went silent for so long.
“Y-yeah, sorry, just thinking,” he responds hastily. He gives a long 'hmm,' which you transmit as well, before ultimately shrugging and flopping back in his seat.
“I'm gonna be honest,” he finally says. “I'm really try to prove myself as a pilot, so I'm thinking about telling Shado about what we've found when we get back. But, we don't even know what we've found. So I'm thinking we should go in and find out. That way, we know whether it's worth the money, worth the reputation, or anything else, really. If it's a big empty box, then there's no point even worrying over it in the first place.”
“That's... I mean, I get it, I suppose,” Mouse hesitantly concedes. “A find like this would net us some serious rep in town. But none of that matters if we get ambushed in there and never make it back.”
Tendou grins, showing his teeth. “If we run into any Hex, we'll just have to destroy them.”
Mouse sighs. “I have no idea where that confidence comes from, kid. You've never been in a real fight, have you? Remember, I'm kitted for scouting and long range harassment.” She raises her marksman rifle to make her point. “Close quarters combat in there is a death sentence for me, so if we step into some shit, you're on your own.”
His earlier enthusiasm doused, Tendou grumbles. “Fine, fine, I get it.” He pauses, then has a thought. “Actually, with all your sensors, won't we be able to scout the place pretty easily? We shouldn't run into any ambushes then.” As he speaks, he turns to look back at the fallen Hex.
“Well, yeah, my sonic scanner will help, but it can't get us every little detail, you know. Especially not if the Hex aren't moving around.” You walk over and pick up the Bush shotgun while listening.
“Mm, we'll have to be careful, I guess.” You turn the gun in your hands, quickly working out how to inspect it. Unfortunately, it's unloaded. And you don't have any ammo for it, so you drop it again. Moving toward the entrance next, you look up at the large doors. “Just have to see for ourselves...”
Mouse comes over, taking up position as well. It's a set of double doors, which look to slide apart at the center. Of course like the hanger you originally came from, there's no clear way to open them.
Thankfully, Mouse speaks up. “I'll see if I can get these doors.” There's a pause, during which you do a scan of the area, and find that there's an accessible computer system nearby. Again, just like the hanger. You wait briefly for her to work, before she comes back. “Damn, no good. It's not accepting any of the standard codes. Looks like we'll have to force the door.”
“Alright, let's take this nice and easy then,” Tendou says, drawing the Kelpie. He aims it down, right at the seam where the two doors meet. Unlike the hanger's doors, bent apart at the bottom by the robot that chased Tendou, these ones still meet quite closely.
He pulls the trigger, and you fire at that gap. The laser weapon fires in short, three round bursts, one after another. The concentrated laser beam flashes across the metal rapidly heat it, melting away a corner of the door, right at the bottom.
Once that's done, you return the weapon to its holster. “There might be a manual override inside, I'm going to go check,” Tendou says, close to the gap as you go down on a knee.
“Wait, what? That could be insanely dangerous!” Mouse warns, taken aback by the plan. Nevertheless, Tendou climbs out of the cockpit. He ducks through the hole in the door, snaking around the melted away metal on the way, and peers around, turning left and right, before he runs off somewhere inside the building.
“I can't believe it, this guy is insane...” Mouse says, still on an open line, even though there's presumably no one to hear her now. You log her words anyway, adding them to the comms interface for when Tendou gets back. “What idiot gets out of their ray in a place like this? If he gets himself killed, it's not my fault, damn it!”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
You wait another few minutes, Mouse's frame moving slightly, like she's fidgeting at the controls, until the doors begin to creak and grind, before they slowly slide open. If she has any response, she must be keeping it to herself, because she just steps back, getting some distance from the opening doorway, gun half-raised like she isn't sure if something is going to jump out at her.
Thankfully, nothing does, before Tendou comes jogging out. He climbs into the cockpit, still breathing heavily. “The switch was pretty far in there,” he pants out.
While standing up, you give a flash to draw his eyes to the comms panel, which he scans over. “Mm,” he grunts, clearly unhappy about getting badmouthed when he couldn't hear it, but he visibly shakes it off before hitting comms again. “Alright, let's go take a look.”
You both walk slowly toward the open doors, Tendou turning to eye the weapons panel for some time, before he taps on the small phaser and Nian to show he wants them charged and ready to use. Of course, you have to wait for him to actually draw the Nian before you can use the wireless charging module in your hand to get it powered up.
Moving into the dim interior of the facility, Tendou turns you, pointing off to a nearby wall on the left. “Door switch is over there.” Mouse nods back. “Way further on foot...” he murmurs, probably to himself.
Besides that, there's a hall of sorts, directly to your right. It widens out as it continues on for a short way, before opening up into another area, though you can't see anything beyond that from the entrance. Like the hanger, it's a structure of concrete. Blank floors and blank walls stretching throughout, with only a sparse handful of lights overhead providing illumination for the space.
Tendou waves at the radio scanner map, you expand it for him. Even if the detail is lacking, it shows a little more of the area around the corner. Not that much more though, considering that it's a wide open area. Mouse comes over comms, saying much the same, though she also adds that the wall on the end of the hall shows signs of having another room on the other side.
With a small gesture to keep moving forward from Tendou, you both take one careful step at a time, as the entrance hall widens from forty or so feet across, to something closer to sixty or eighty. And then, you reach the end of the wall on your left. Sliding close, you lean out to peer around.
It's just another vast open area, completely bare... until something moves. Everyone tenses up when it appears from the far distance, coming toward you. It's a robot, a little larger than a human. Non-humanoid and round, like a chunky circle. It glides along the floor in odd, uncertain patterns, turning now and then with no apparent pattern. The whole while, it emits a low humming noise.
“Is that a cleaning bot?” Mouse asks, though her tone is incredulous, so it doesn't appear to be a question, and Tendou doesn't respond. It buzzes right on, through a small door to your right, into the room Mouse pointed out earlier. That wall is angled, so paired with your earlier observation on the outside, that room occupies the southeast corner of the building.
Stepping out from your cover, you enter the cleared open space, and look around. As you walk, more halls head off to the left, even more spacious than the one you entered from. Each is upward of a hundred feet across, and far, far longer down their length. It's hard to say at this distance, but both appear to open up into more rooms.
Given the distance that way, and the nearby wall on your right, it's safe to say that you're on the far eastern side of the facility right now, moving north.
Checking you immediate surroundings, there are finally a few objects scattered about on the ground, rather than purely bare concrete floors. The density increases off to your right, where the east wall contains a long section of shutters. They appear designed for opening up a very large space, even compared to a ray frame. Like huge objects, or entire shipments needed to be moved in and out of this place.
Just beyond the shutters, the wall juts inward at an odd angle. Perhaps it was built that way to accommodate the difficult terrain, with a cliff they couldn't deal with in that spot?
While gazing at the odd section of wall, you pass into a new area, turning back to see... you aren't certain what it is, but Mouse gasps aloud.
“Holy shit!” she moves faster, almost at a run, to cross the huge room within moments.
From where you entered, a single flat wall stretches across the left side of the room, as if bisecting the facility. But in the middle of the wall, there's a massive panel of windows. On the other side, you can make machinery. What does it do though?
Mouse supplies that information, even as you wonder about it. “Do you know what this is? It's an old world factory! They used to make things in places like this!”
“Make things? Like what?” Tendou asks.
“I don't know, all sorts of stuff,” it hardly sounds like she's even considering the question through her excitement.
“But then, what does this place make?” Tendou asks, a little more deadpan than before. You leans side to side, looking through the huge window, but it's all just an endless sea of overlapping machinery.
“Uhh, let's see...” Mouse wonders aloud, probably doing something related to that, though you can't see what. Continuing to check around yourself, you find a very obvious control panel of sorts, directly in front of the glass panel. It's tiny though, sized for a human.
While waiting for Mouse to finish whatever she's doing, you kneel down and Tendou climbs out again. He approaches the panel, tapping at it for a couple minutes.
By the time he comes back, Mouse has finished her own investigation.
“This is big – this is huge. This place can make like, basically anything. Construction materials, vehicles, ray frame parts, anything! It must be one of those mass production facilities. Forget raiding it or stripping it, or profit, or anything. This place is important. With a place like this just out of town, Shado can actually make things again.”
The breathless excitement in her voice is palpable. Even Tendou is beginning to look hopeful. He look up, just above the screen in a way that you've come to recognize as him looking at 'you.' He makes a gesture, like he wants to to weigh in on this.
If what Mouse says is true, this discovery will absolutely cement your reputation back in Shado. However, you can't help but consider that you don't know if the facility is still operational. The power is on, but you don't know how long it will stay that way. And you've hardly checked the building, there might not be any materials to use. There might even be Hex lurking around.
You consider how to respond...
----------------------------------------
Vote:
[ ] Get back to town to report this
[ ] Look around more
-For construction materials
-For fuel
-For finished products
-For Hex
-For something else
[ ] Try to use the production facility
-To make what?
[ ] Write-in