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RP: Kennewes Offensive NSS Banning

A few hours after graveyard shift had started, all seemed to be going well. Valen was in the middle of a catnap when the freighter's AI beeped at him. He drowsily asked, "Eh? What is it, Banning?" Before the ship could answer, main power went out. It took a couple of seconds before emergency power clicked on to illuminate the darkness. By that time, Valen had become fully awake and was fumbling around for a source of light. He found an old flashlight that barely worked, and the Geshrin then clicked open his communicator, "Captain, sorry to disturb you, but we may have a problem..."

All over the ship, there was no power. Even the engines had stopped. The entire freighter was dead in the water for no apparent reason. Without the AI or the internal sensors, the problem would have to be manually found and fixed. Emergency lights and systems began running throughout the entire ship. Fortunately, they seemed to be working well enough.
 
After a few more words with Dream, Tweak had returned to her quarters and continued logging the day's activities in her journal.

Then the lights went out. She looked up at the ceiling as the emergency power came on, the low-power backup lights giving her more than enough light to see by.

"Banning?"

There was no answer. Tweak slid off of the bunk and went to the door. It didn't open when she approached, so she pressed her palms against the door and slid it open. The corridor outside was also mostly dark...was the power out everywhere? Tweak rapped sharply on the door to her neighbors' quarters.

"Hello?"
 
Just as Tweak finished her light taps on the door, however, a set of muffled voice could be perceived from behind the doors confines.

"What's goin' on George?"
"I dunno Len, go check outside or something."
"...doors not openin', George."
"Jeez, what happened to the damn lights?"
"...they went out, George."
"I know that. I'm just wondering why it's so damn dark..."
"...because they lights are out, George."
"LENNY! OPEN THE DAMN DOOR!"
"...doors not openin' George."
"THEN MAKE IT OPEN!"

A second or so later, the door would heave upwards slightly and hovered there for a moment, before a giant set of fingers wrapped themselves beneath the door's bottom ridge. With a heaving grunt, Lenny appeared in place of the functionless door. George walked out angrily, nearly running straight into the Neko as he exited. He jumped back, of course, flailing for a second from the shock as Lenny moved to join him in the dimly-lit corridor.

"G-holy shi...don't do that! What the hell're you doing?!" the Nepleslia exclaimed, somewhat forcibly. He was apparently quite shaken by something.
 
Tweak jumped back as George stormed out into the corridor.

"I'm trying to find out what happened. The lights went out," said Tweak with a touch of sarcasm on the last sentence. "No one seems to be around and the communications systems are down, otherwise we probably would have heard from the Captain by now. So I'm going to try getting to the bridge and see what's happening."
 
Okay, so I like it when its dark in my room. But not out here, especially when everybody is shouting. Fian massaged his temples while the rest of the Marines were making a commotion in the Caffeteria from the power outage. As an officer, I have an obligation to know what is going on. The Vel Steyr stood up and started feeling for the exit, touching a few other marines in the wrong places instead. "Elsae, help me find the bridge, I dont think anybody here is happy to show me around."

'Yes Master. The door is to the other way.'
 
Engineering was dark. In that darkness, a deep rumbling began to slowly and steadily grow louder until it finally resolved itself into a coherent stream of enraged profanity. One or two of the emergency lights finally came on, illuminating Pavel's bulky form extricating itself from a very small and now very dark access tunnel. The assistant engineer fell to the deck with resounding crash.

“Banning, you thankless bitch! I work a triple shift replacing all your old couplings and this is how you repay me? Complete main power failure? If I were not stuck with only you between me and the cold of space, I would. . . I would something!”

Pavel stood up, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and laid a hand to his broad forehead. “But, I am generous. While I wait for chief to get down here, I will allow you to explain what has happened here, and I would very much like for you to do so. I will tell you why. Because even as we speak, the chief engineer will no doubt be waking up very, very angry, and he will ask me, 'Pavel, why does my ship not have power?' And I will only be able to say, 'because she is a heartless pieces of scrap metal.' We both know this is not the case. You are not heartless, just fickle, yes? So, I will run the diagnostics, and if you are still in there, you ungrateful AI, you may tell me what in the endless vacuum has just occurred.”

Pavel strode over to an emergency interface and started trying to bring up the Banning's diagnostic programs. As he struggled with the console in the growing silence, a look of concern spread across his face.

“Oh, and Banning? Please do not be dead. I would miss you.”
 
After waiting a moment without a reaction from the duo, Tweak resumed heading toward the bridge. She reached it in a short time and gave the door a couple of hard knocks.

"Hello? Is anyone still alive in there?" she called out.
 
On a small corner of Pavel's soncole, a small icon flashed. Apparently, there was a transmission, or, to be more precise, a transmission request, laying in wait in the ship's internal systems. A very weak signal.

Which was odd. The ship was completely powered down: where did the energy for the transmission come from?


In her room, Dream sighed.
"Damnit. THIS is what happens when you upload a cheap IA knockoff, instead of a mature, reliable SI. Not to mention the lack of a druidess to tend to the ship's soul." She muttered under her breath as she finished wiring up her Voidwalker suit's Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator to the ship, to provide whatever little power she could scrape off it to try and get a signal out and through the ship... hoping that someone would notice.

"...And what in the Otherworld's name is with those systems? Just how much energy to Nepleslian ships need?" She cursed, pulling out a thin wire from a small compartment hidden behind her right ear and linking up to a panel in the wall, next to the suit's generator.

 
Pavel's forehead creased in confusion as he read the message, his diagnostics purring away in the background. How had that circuit come back on line? It wasn't even attached to the emergency power grid.

“What is this girl, magic? Well, magical girl cannot get her door open, so I will have to help. Hmm. Does cargo bay really need emergency lighting? No. Do I?” Pavel scratched his head. “Eh, light is for the weak.” The lights in engineering went out. Pavel was illuminated only by the soft glow of his screen.

Pavel muttered to himself as he brought up a diagram of the ship's power grid. “Which capacitors will probably not blow up if I charge them? Mmmm, these look good. Now we wait a few minutes and see what we can see.”

Five minutes later, a message appeared on Dream's console and her door jerked open about two feet before lurching to a halt.


Back in engineering, Pavel hummed with pleasure at his success as he wrote a message to the bridge.

 
Valen swore slightly when the captain didn't respond. Why wasn't the communicator working? Even if main power was gone, this device had its own power source! He then heard the knocks on the bridge door and responded, "I am alright. The lights went out, and I think we have stalled." He didn't really want to try to get the doors open, but then the internal comm beeped that it had a waiting message. "One moment," he said as the Geshrin quickly read the message and responded.


He then turned back to the door, "Hey, you out there! If you can get to engineering, please go and see if you can help! If you see Mergeo and anyone else with engineering experience on the way, please bring them with you! We need as many good hands down at engineering as possible right now!"

Valen then turned to his own emergency terminal. He needed to bring the AI online. Hopefully, she could help to figure out what the hell happened. It was a start, at least.
 
"Okay, on my way!" Tweak called back. Not quite sure where engineering was, however, she explored the ship, checking random rooms (the ones with doors she could open, anyway) until she found one that had a lot more machinery and consoles than the other rooms.

"Hello?"

As she waited for a response, Tweak looked around as best she could in the pitch black room, at first relying on her hands and feet to tell her where things were. Then, in a stroke of ingenuity, she tapped a clawed finger against a metal panel and let her Tactical OS interpret the sound reflections into a "view" of engineering. Using this method, the disguised neko sounded her way forward.

(OOC, to Cato: In case you haven't read the previous posts, Tweak is a neko, but is wearing a cloth tied over her head to hide her ears and her oversized jacket has sleeves long enough to hide her hands most of the time.)
 

Message sent, Pavel sat down to wait for the diagnostics to run themselves out. So far, there was no hint of what could have caused the failure. He could go and start checking things manually, but there wasn't much chance he'd find anything looking by himself that the computer couldn't find faster. And with so many systems down, it could take the rest of the engineering crew forever to arrive.

Pavel retrieved engineering's emergency flashlight and flicked it on. He trundled over to the minuscule break room, poured himself a lukewarm cup of coffee from the defunct machine, and returned to his seat. After turning the flashlight back off to conserve its power pack, Pavel drew out a deck of playing cards from a pocket and started to deal himself a hand of solitaire in the dim light cast by the screen.

He was half way through his second game when the computer chimed at him, telling him the capacitors he was using to store energy to open the doors were fully charged, giving him a good five or six door partial door openings. “Finally,” he muttered, and restored power to the lighting systems in the cargo hold and engineering.

The dull red of the emergency lighting began to flicker back on, slowly revealing the long, machine-filled compartment- and its newest occupant. As the last lights came back on, a young woman in an over-sized jacket and a sort of head scarf materialized out of the pitch darkness at the far end of the room. The engineer jumped to his feet, scattering his cards and nearly overturning his coffee.

“What are you doing sneaking around here in the dark?! Are you trying to scare me to death? For all I know you could be some horrible alien monster come to kill us all! If I had been armed I could have killed you! Or at least hurt you very badly. But that is not the point." Pavel pulled himself together a bit and leveled a disapproving glare at the interloper.

"What I am really trying to say is who are you and why have you come here?”
 
Meanwhile, Dream was walking along the main corridor. Thankfully, her huge cybernetic eye could be set to see pretty much any length of the electromagnetic spectrum, so darkness wasn't much of a problem to her.

Not knowing anything about the Banning (or Nepleslian ships in general), however, was.

"Damnit. What kind of weak ship spirit just dies like this?" she muttered, trying to come up with an idea. "Well, this sounds like a job for Dream Zero Zero, Starship Priestess Extraordinaire." She stroke a pose, even though there was no one to witness her sheer awesomeness.

"...Now. Engineering block." She added, muttering to herself. "Maybe, once there, I could help this Pavel guy resurrect the ship's soul, as long as it's not in the Otherworld yet."

Well, yes. Given the usual redundancy found aboard Freespacer ships, she couldn't imagine that the whole deal was being caused by nothing more than a severed power line.

"Mhhh. Pavel. I must think of a nickname. Assistant Engineer? Bet it's something like a Gearhead." She pondered. "But there's already Gearhead Ray here on this ship, so he's gotta be Techhead. Techhead Pal. Sounds good."

She nodded to herself in the darkness.

After less than a minute, she heard some noises coming from a definite direction. Voices.

"Huh. This place looks like Engineering enough." She noted, staring at a sign on the wall nearby. "I gotta learn those funny signs Nepleslians use to write things on physical supports soon." She added, as a personal reminder, walking inside what she thought could have been the Banning's engineering section.
 
"You didn't hear me say 'hello'? Or my tapping?" Tweak looked at Pavel, a bit surprised, but just shrugged it off. "My name is Tweak Three Seven. I'm a passenger, but I'm also an engineer and the person on the bridge said I should come down here and see what I can do to help." She surveyed the room noting where things were and smiling to herself at the accuracy of her improvised sonar.
 
Valen had almost got the AI back online with the limited power that he had. Unfortunately, it was spouting out strange data figures. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he yelled at the AI before smacking his emergency terminal lightly. He then sent a message back down to engineering.


After a few moments of stretching, he began work on the delirious freighter AI.
 
Pavel quickly gathered up his cards and gulped down the last of his coffee as subtly as he could, flushing only very slightly. “I was busy. . . with running diagnostics." Pavel pretended to be busy with the computer, noticed the communication specialist's message, and quickly powered the bridge doors open about two feet. "But they are too slow, yes? I was just about to start checking the power routers and have a look at the reactor. If you can find your way around engineering in the dark so well, I'm sure that you will have no problems picking up where things are around here. Very standard, really, if you know Nepleslian vessels. Here.” Pavel lifted a panel off of the bulkhead. “This is what a router should look like. I do not know if they are the same where you come from, but if it is on fire or has been exploded, it might be part of the problem. After we check those, we go to have a look at the reactor.”

Not waiting for an answer, Pavel started off, then turned back, looking a bit contrite, but mostly just tired. “And do forgive me. I have not introduced myself to you. My name is Pavel Rostropovich, assistant engineer. Today has not been such a good day. It is very, very long and very full of surprises. And I hate surprises.”

At that moment, a exotic, brightly dressed, and green skinned figure strode confidently into the engineering space and the ship's AI found a way to turn on the local intercom and clearly stated, “Eleven. One-three-five-nine-eight-seven-two. Z-vector is thirteen degrees, four minutes and seventeen seconds off of the galactic plane. Two.”

Pavel stomped over to the intercom controls and bashed the speaker off with and angry slap of his cybernetic hand. “You see! This is what I am talking about!”
 
Dream, upon entering and hearing the intercom uttering that nonsense, rolled her eyes (or at least, her left eye) in the now-damaged speakers' general direction and sighed.

Then, she nodded in Tweak's direction (a nod of acknowledgment, sorta like "Ah, you're here too. It's nice to see you. Let's cut the pleasantries and get to work now, shall we?"), and raised an hand in some sort of informal greeting towards Pavel, utterly ignoring his brief outburst and his slapping the speaker. "Yo. You must be the Techhead Pal guy I talked with through that improv transmission back then." She said. Well, she was in Engineering, so it must be him.
(Because this WAS Engineering, right? She seriously needed to learn how to read that Nep writing system.)

Ghe glanced once again towards the speakers. "I'm not here to criticize your choices in starship engineering and design... But you Neps should really get some serious, reliable Synthetic Intelligences, instead of some cheap Artificial Intelligence knockoff that's not even self-motivated enough to survive a power shortage or two." She said, more to herself than anything else.

"So, I'm here to help." With a gesture, she brushed her colorful longcoat off her hips, revealing a huge utility belt with numerous pouches and a number of oddly-shaped, oddly-colored tools. "Since your ships don't repair themselves, we'll have to do it the old-fashioned way, I suppose. You know this ship better than I do, so tell me what I can do and I'll do it."
 
Tweak had listened to the older engineer only for a little bit, then slowly backed up before Dream arrived.

"I'll...check over here..." she murmured as he continued talking before she went behind a large bit of machinery, not noticing Dream's silent greeting. Once out of sight, the neko relaxed a little and looked around for what Pavel had shown her. Fire...scorch marks...smoke... she thought, searching for such signs of malfunction and destruction. The engine room was not completely unconventional, though there was evidence of Pavel's personal touches to the systems. Tweak smiled to herself as she admired the work, but the sense that something was missing became unnerving. The normally barely-audible hum of power transfer was gone, making engineering sound more like a tomb than the heart of a ship.

"Let's get you fixed up, 'kay? Tell me where it hurts..." whispered Tweak with a small smile.

[EDIT: Sorry, didn't remember his age correctly. Changed the word to "older".]
 
"Yo, how's everyone doin'? The power issues are definitely coming from inside Engineering." Mergeo greeted the people inside as he entered Engineering, before beginning to mutter to himself. The man had spent a good twenty minutes doing rounds about the Banning, and had found no trace of damage. And this happens.

Well go figure. Let's see what the old man has to say about this. Eh? Old... maybe not. The captain is OLD... but Pavel? I little on the big side, but he's a good guy to drink around. Too bad he hasn't had any chances with a good woman. Makes a guy wonder... Oh man... what am I even thinking?

Okay... Mergeo, shut the fuck up and ask him how shit's going. You never know, he might know something.

"So Pavel, what d'you find? I know you've been here long enough." He asked, in his definite accent.
 
After the comm link spattered as it did, Valen sighed. At least the ship comm was online... sort of. It probably did that on all decks, but oh well. He went back to work. He wasn't sure, but he thought that he spotted the reason for the AI's quirkiness: a virus. How this virus got into the main computer system was beyond him. Only an actual person could upload something this efficient and evasive... but that means... he cleared his head of those kinds of thoughts and continued working.
 
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