[HNMS Eidolon] Grasping at StarDust...

[Exhack]

"It'll be alright, Eda-chan. But we have to get out of here, and somewhere safe first." Masami said in a soothing voice, cradling the AI in her arms. If there was one thing the doctor considered herself good at, it was her bedside manner, which she held in fairly high regard. She looked the avatar in the eyes, her expression sincere, but distinctly serious. "Are there any places on the ship that can be locked from the inside, but reached by the communications system?"

 

[Kim]

The little girl avatar whimpered as she tried to compose herself to give the doctor a response, "Only the cargo hold and my room are locked from the inside but..but there isn't anyone else here. Everyone that's supposed to be here is here... Masami-san, please fix Morya!

The gathered women behind Worfield were muttering. Many of the voices were just being heard for the first time- as they had taken to sleeping or simply not socializing over the course of the past four days.

A dark haired woman with a medium tanned complexion, wearing a set of oil stained light grey coveralls looked at Worfield with a stern expression. "So what the hell do we do now? Captain's dead, and we're flying blind unless someone else knows where the Devil it is that we're going aside from the hysterical AI."

Ceres let out a long sigh. "We have to stay calm, Melrose. That's what we gotta do.... and... clean up the mess. What do you think Kamatsu? Do you have any experience with crime scenes or even watched any? All I know is we have to move the captain's body- probably into the cold storage area. There might still be a couple stasis tubes if they didn't pull those out. We could put her in there until we get back."

"By.. C...Chiharu... I'm going to be sic.." A pink haired neko with blue eyes wearing a dark blue jumpsuit looked nauseous at the grizzly scene before them and shrank back away from the group, covering her mouth. She made a quick retreat towards the head to lose her dinner.

 

[SUBLIMEinal]

Worfield nodded. "I've seen them before... on TV and stuff.... my dad used to bootleg Nepleslian stations..." The FIO was starting to act again. "I'm not sure if we're supposed to clean all this up... " In all actuality, he didn't know how Yamataian police handled crime scenes.

He walked towards the body slowly, and leaned down to pick up the legs of the corpse. "Might as well get it out of here, though..."

 

[Kim]

Melrose made a face as she headed down the corridor. "I'll go get a mop and a bucket, I don't think I can take a week of MREs and rotting Morya bits. Hey Kamatsu have Ceres get you a blanket or something so you don't get goo all over yourself!"

Ceres got out of the technician's way as she nodded. "Right. Wait a sex, Kamatsu. I'll get you a blanket to wrap the captain up in. I'll be right back," she gestured at the man before hurrying off to get a blanket, not noticing her Freudian slip.

 

[Exhack]

Kamatsu's done his job, but the Captain... I have to look at her. If it's as bad as I think it is, our best option might as well be to lock her in stasis and hope it hasn't been too long. And I forget this is an old KE-F8... but those rooms might be needed, even if I shouldn't make any assumptions right now. Masami thought to herself as she prepared to leave medbay. She glanced back at the ship avatar and gave her an uneasy smile. "Okay, well... I'll do my best, Eda-chan. Just... do me a quick favor? I want you to prepare one of the stasis chambers, just in case I can't help the Captain." She said, exiting the room.

She quickly made her way to the Operating Rooms and grabbed a stretcher to carry the injured person. That was hoping that the body was solid and mostly intact, or it might be really messy. The civilian NH-29 doctor ran the way to where everyone had massed, supporting the large but fairly lightweight object underneath her left arm. "Gomen... out of my way! I need to see how she is!" In a tense, but unpanicking tone of voice.

 

[Kim]

"Y...yes! We have one stasis tube still intact, it'll be waiting for you, Masami-san," Eda replied tearfully with a a tremor of hope in her voice.

Meanwhile, Ceres returned to Worfield with a blanket as Masami returned to the scene of the crime. "Oh hey Doc, I think it might be a lost cause... she is missing a head and last I checked... Nepleslians can't regrow limbs like nekos can," the cook observed rather grimly as she offered Worfield the blanket. "Melrose should be back here in a bit with a mop to help clean up the mess but I'll let her know to hold off until your done." She shrugged and got out of the doctor's way.

Chidori, the pink haired neko, didn't quite make it to the rest room as she very loudly, lost her dinner on the carpet of the corridor between the bridge and the kitchen.

Melrose cursed loudly as she heard Ceres say her name and the pink haired neko's retching noises. "Fuck, Ceres I'll help you clean up the mess in the kitchen if you help me clean up Mikage's fucking hairball."

Ceres sighed and nodded, "Right. I think we'll need a broom or something to get that out. I knew I shouldn't have given her kimchi... but hey, at least it's pretty!"

Melrose looked unamused by this comment. "If someone could invent a way to make vomit on carpet not stink, then I will appraise the aesthetic values of it when I'm not the one cleaning it up."

 

[Kim]

The havoc created by the sudden murder of the ship's captain, Moriya Scott, rippled through the crew like a boulder being dropped in a pond. The ship's AI, Eda, was uncertain of what to do and who to turn command of the ship to... there was nothing in her programming in regards to what to really do in the event that the captain was brutally murdered underway. Her communications systems were locked out until they reached their destination in 3 more days.

Everyone was under suspicion for the murder, and no one was able to explain WHY exactly Eda hadn't been able to record what had happened in the kitchen. All that anyone knew was that the captain was dead and they were flying deaf, mute and blind until they could get to their drop off location.

Ceres and Melrose had quickly cleaned up the larger chunks of the mess made by Chidori's retching and what was left of the captain in a matter of minutes but the task of actually sanitizing the small kitchen took a couple of hours with the two women working in a forced silence.

Elsewhere on the ship, Chidori was hiding in a bathroom stall with her head over the toilet. By now there was nothing left in the poor, pink hair neko's stomach to heave into the toilet. It seemed like every time she calmed down enough to stop, there was some grizzly reminder of what happened that started the dry heaving again. She was pallid, sweating and miserable in her inability to grasp what had happened.

During all the commotion, Huaca had finally woken up and had reluctantly dressed in her gray jumpsuit uniform to watch the bridge's comm in the event of the black out suddenly ending. She sat with a panicked awareness in her eyes as she sat in the communications chair with her knees held against her chest with her arms. The blue eyed Yamataian was grateful to have missed the moment of horrified discovery of the captain's body and troubled by the fact that in such a small vessel with such a small crew... no one knew ANYTHING about what had happened. No one had even heard the shot! She wondered... could the Yamataian man, Kamatsu had done it? He was truly the odd man out.. maybe being trapped on a vessel full of women drove him to try to test his luck with the captain and he failed? How could she protect herself from the man and the rest of the crew? She couldn't trust anyone other than Eda. she realized that much.

"Eda-chan? Can you pull up an updated map of the modifications HNM did to the ship? I want to see if they left in the armory..."

 

[Kim]

3 Weeks later...

The HNMS Eidolon finally returned to its home port. There were only 3 crew members remaining, the Nekovalkyrja doctor, the Yamataian man and the Nepleslian cook. Somehow, they managed to survive the ordeal. It was hard to get a coherent story out of any of the survivors about what really happened, even the ship's AI was traumatized in some way.

Sirin, the shipping company's owner, intervened in their interrogation by her Loss Provention manager and placed the surviving crew into crisis counseling in hopes that perhaps through therapy, they might be able to discover what truly happened to the rest of the Eidolon's crew.

The ship's cook, Ceres Hamilton was the most talkative but what she said made very little sense. Sirin was concerned that some terrorist faction had implanted someone onto the ship and systematically started taking out the crew. But her Loss Prevention manager was thinking that the survivors were the terrorists, after all, they conventionally had no documentation or proof that they were absolved of innocence. Even the ship's AI didn't know how the first murder began.

The other concern was what had happened to the YSS Stardust, the ship still had its cargo so no contact had been made better the Eidolon and the Stardust and the ship had obviously not been attacked by Pirates. The survivors were suspects in the murders of the other 4 crew members until something could be recovered from Eda. But, they could keep them on basis of suspicion for 14 days. All Sirin could hope for was a break through to appease the families of those 4 women...

 

[Kim]

After a couple months of work, the technicians were able to pull salvageable data from Eda's memory banks. They were able to determine who the murderer had been and finally absolved the last remaining crew of suspicion. They had determined that Melrose had murdered the captain for reasons unknown.

Further investigation into Melrose's background yielded no leads- whomever she was before she joined the crew was a mystery as all the other points of reference checked out.

Sirin was depressed about the events that occurred on the Eidolon but she was still rather concerned with what had happened to the YSS Stardust. All she could figure was that it landed on that unknown planet and something attacked the crew before they could get a distress beacon out. But she hoped that the Yamataian Star Army would investigate into the matter further. But for now, Sirin had to wonder what those three had seen... what they experienced.

The only thing they could figure out was that whatever it was on that planet made some sort of weird gurgling, clicking noise.