Concordia Veil - Computer Room
"We're done," Desmond said, leaning back and inspecting his handiwork as he put the tools back in their place, having to strain his hearing to make sense out of Rathe's voice. Even though the noise was subsonic, it still made focusing on other ones harder. "Bring the bucket, I'll open the loading ramp," the bounty hunter added, turning from his spot to regard Amanozako. The annoyance in her expression brought a sly smirk to his face.
"Just keep a hold of it. Whatever we find here that can give us an advantage is worth keeping. Besides, it looks like the entire crew is on shore leave," he said, making his way out through the makeshift path he had carved through the strands of cloth. The bounty hunter then deliberately turned to look at the neko once again. "Oh and go check the cockpit for the ship's logs, that should give us a clue as to where the crew is," Desmond said, bringing a finger to his ear again and pressing it against the comms unit. "Danny, find anything?" he said, making his way towards the engineering section to shut down the hellish rave party that the ship had become.
Captain's Cabin
The door didn't budge against Danny's baton; it appeared to be jammed fast in place. The gap was more than wide enough for him to walk through, however, so opening it further proved unnecessary anyhow. The darkened room wasn't flashing in the chaotic light show that was outside, oddly, but rather, the lights within were completely shut off, leaving the room only intermittently illuminated by the flashing lights from out in the commons, throwing the blinks of long shadows across a narrow arc in the floor and to the back wall. On either side of the occasional flashes of light, the room was almost pitch black. The faint outline of the outer corner of beds bunked atop one another came into view every now and then to the left, and a chair could be seen pushed haphazardly against the far wall.
Danny had kept his night vision turned off once the strobe lighting had started - and it didn't seem to extend into this room. He rubbed his eyes through his mask a little, then swooshed his hand across his eyesight to bring nightvision up into view, washing what he could see in a myriad of greens bathing the room, slowly brightening as it took the darkness and dim ambient light of the room in - along with the occasional pulse of strobe lighting from outside. The pulsing lights coming in front beyond the door gave his night vision sensors quite a bit of difficulty in adjusting, causing his field of vision to erratically flash white and struggle with bursts of static as the tiny computer worked on overdrive to keep its display steady. Even amidst the chaotic interference, he was still able to see well enough if he took his time and moved slowly.
He heard Desmond's voice in his ear - a welcome sound amongst the subsonic, rave party bombardment that'd forced him to enable ear protection. "Common room, Captain's quarters," he replied, "No signs of life, nor anything that stands out, going to investigate now." He said as he looked for a flat surface, a desk to inspect perhaps, something to read up on his target. His sidelining investigation of the ship's inhabitants was still a fit of curiosity he had to examine.
The cabin was rather sparsely decorated, the furnishings within having the same spartan, almost prison-like qualities of the common room. The bunked twin beds on his left were oddly devoid of any bedding aside from a raggedy blanket crumpled up on one end of the bottom bunk, and the thin, double-doored locker at the foot of the bed was locked tight. On the floor Danny could make out scuff marks extending around the bed's feet, and they looked relatively fresh. Either the cabin's resident had reason to move the bed back and forth, or she simply liked redecorating often.
To the right was a metallic, little-more-than-functional dresser of sorts, and just next to it was the desk he sought. There wasn't much sitting on top of it aside from a pair of aviator-style sunglasses placed on the far corner against the wall, beneath a bare-bones lamp that was little more than a yellowed light bulb on a short pole. The chair, as he noticed before, was shoved away from the desk and against the back wall, but just in front of the hollow where the chair fit was a notepad lying there, about the size of a hand span.
Fascinating... Danny wondered as he looked around the desk and examined its contents. All of the furniture looks so basic. Form over function, no signs of embellishment or decoration. Everything in the room to him didn't scream someone whose rapsheet included disrupting the peace, destruction, and jaywalking to name a few. Scuffs on the floor from moving the bunk bed around, few blankets. Laundry day maybe? The way they lived with such restraint in how they presented their living just didn't add up somehow.
The sunglasses on the desk caught his eye and he raised an eyebrow, grabbed them gently by the frames and peered through them. Hm. Ooh! He made an 'oh' with his mouth. Good sunglasses...! He would've put them on too, but his ears were currently smoothed over by the pseudofabric of his strange sneaking suit. He put them back down where he found them and flipped the notepad open, examining pages and leaving a smudge where his crumbed fingers had touched the edge of the page - unable to spot it with the nightvision's slight loss of detail.
The notepad was conspicuously blank, although it appeared to have been recently used, given the fact that several pages had been torn off of it. At a glance, it appeared that almost half of the paper was missing. However, running his fingers over the surface, he noticed indentions in its surface. The marks where a pen had written on the previous page, perhaps?
Something written, but the pages are missing and I'm no mind reader. Danny sighed. It must be terrible to be able to read people's minds. He concluded as he examined the indentations, and put his finger against the page gently, then ran his finger across them, trying to see what was written by touch. It felt a bit like Trade was written onto the pad. Will settle for reading paper.
Amid the erratic lighting and the low vibrations resounding through the ship even out of the aging, tinny intercom speakers, he couldn't make out any specifics, but it appeared to be some kind of list. He would have to move to more ideal conditions to read exactly what it said, but he felt relatively confident that written on the previous page had been several vendors located in various places throughout the station, most likely things that the captain needed to hunt down for her ship.
"Hm. Desmond. I think I've found a shopping list," Danny said over the radio to Desmond.
"Come again?" came the bounty hunter's reply. In the background, there was the noise of metal going against metal as he tried to crowbar the engineering door's open.
"I've found what feels like a list of locations written into this paper." The strange pursuer replied. "They seem to be vendors. We'll take a look together."
"Take it, I'm trying to shut this rave down," he replied.
"Oh thank the Goddess for that," Danny mumbled in relief, speaking in Lorath Ly'thir back over the communications, probably referring to the Lorath Goddess. He grabbed the notepad and placed it in the pack that rested against the small of his back and was held together by his suit and the harness over it.
Hangar - Outside the Concordia Veil
At Rathe's feet, the canister's chirping and whirring began to slow down and descend in pitch, while the lights on it began to dwindle in intensity rapidly. Although he couldn't hear or see the broad spectrum of wavelengths blasting out of the thing, it was obvious that the capacitor had finally run its course. Within the span of five seconds, the device whirred down to silence, going dead and lifeless.
No further communications came in over the loudspeakers, but he knew that the Origin technicians, or perhaps even a security team was almost certainly on their way. Time was not on their side, and he still didn't know if the ship had been silenced or not. In minutes, however, he knew he'd find out, for better or worse.
