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Singing Mountain
5f5c2b
>>1119513
>Reiko wanders from room to room, sniffing around for a control panel or obscure access point she can hack into.
>rolled 11, 6, 16
Comms and navigation room seems like a fairly standard CIC https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/controldeck.php#cicfunct apart from, first, design clearly optimized for people about four meters tall (leaving Reiko with the uncomfortable sense of reversion to a small child intruding on a sanctum meant for adults), and second, surreal dream imagery on most of the screens rather than legible data. Fractal black thorns, lurid flowers sprouting from rotten meat, clockwork half-melted yet somehow still functional.
Everything seems suspiciously clean. Spots close to the floor that ought to be access panels are sealed tight, and climbing up higher risks triggering unidentified buttons with your feet.
>After a few minutes, she finds one hiding inside the neural interface throne room. Rather than linking to the interface, she links her implant to the neural translators instead.
Wary of losing herself again by diving straight in, Reiko crawls around into the mass of cables behind the throne, mapping interconnections and speculating on the wider systems they correspond to.
>queries on the ship's status;
It's alive. Those aren't mechanical subsystems, for the most part, but organs.
>how well it has detected the hull breach,
Like a splinter in the soft tissue between teeth.
>where the other hull breaches are,
Lot of bruising but nothing else torn. Only exits besides the way you came in are the vast cargo bay - like the maw of a baleen whale - and emergency drive halo access.
>how much fuel the ship has,
Severely malnourished, outer skin is NOT supposed to be that color. https://pocketss.tumblr.com/784279836855271424/houseplant-type-friend
>if the ship can scan its surroundings for the fuel it needs,
The memory transfer process is two-way, though the ship-mind is not particularly self-aware or lucid - more like a sick dog noticing how your pockets smell like bacon.
>how the ship maintains life support, if it even has life support, etc.
Most of that air-and-organic-food functionality is entangled with the crew quarters. It wants to fly down to Jackson's Launch, rip that entire shell casing / poison-pond out of the ground and transfer it to the cargo hold. There's easily enough room - like adding a bedroll, or moderately large canteen, to a broad framed backpack.
>specialized in raider tactics
Problem is, as Reiko patiently explains to this hundred thousand ton drowsy-manic nightcraft-puppy, the order of operations. If full repairs require the sludge from the pond, and lifting the pond requires the gravity polarizer's maximum exertion, and the gravity polarizer requires full repairs... there's a hole in my bucket, dear liza, a hole. You can't go sprinting hundreds of miles across the desert to steal water and medicine when you're already badly hurt and dehydrated. Start smaller.
>>1119565
>mission priorities:
>1) Secure the hangar for safe habitation
>2) Figure out ship controls
>3) Repair damage to ship and hangar
>4) Fly off and shoot things that are bad?
>rolled 19, 19, 19, 16, 15, 20, 10, 20
While Reiko explains how repairs aren't currenly possible, Cricket is making progress on those same repairs.
>trained in clock un-making
>create various types of poison
Hangar bay door seems to mostly be a big iris - spiral of thin, overlapping, curved segments. Looks cool, but jams easily, and nigh impossible to get a true airtight seal. Paprika cut a notch into it, plus there's pre-existing patches of crud. Mold or something, but it sounds more like a rust-related jam when it tries to move. Maybe just try... filing down the visible burrs, solvents and gentle polishing for rusty spots, antifungal spray on the mold?
"Rust" absorbs the solvent near instantly, spreads out to twice its initial diameter, then fades into a pattern of yellowish veins, without leaving a single loose flake on the polishing rag. "Mold" seemingly rejects the antifungal spray like sweatdrops on a swamp lotus, but gets steadily darker, thicker, and spongier when massaged, until whole patches peel off as strips of black rubber with the consistency of salted fish, crackling and sizzling like frying grease even as they turn cold to the touch. Whatever the heck that stuff actually was, Cricket's efforts apparently worked - hangar bay door can now open and close on command.
Expedition supplies and chainpods are hauled in to the ship... except for that one crate of individually-wrapped tofu snacks which the four of you had eaten about half of on the elevator ride, which has "mysteriously" refilled itself, and is prudently discarded.
>>1119568
>She'll start with the crew quarters, exploring all the way to the storm shelter / cold storage.
Upper crew quarters can be confirmed clear at a glance - all one big brightly-lit open space. Sweeping the lower deck with certainty will take a lot longer, and probably at least three people. There are two sets of stairs leading down, at opposite corners, and it's a literal maze. Walls, floor, and ceiling are a continuous yet non-repeating pattern of diamond-shaped ceramic tiles. Dark green wider ones, pale blue pointier ones, creating the vague visual impression of a forest canopy with sky peeking throuh. Dim light and high humidity... a jungle-themed locker room. Dozens of cubbyholes, varying sizes and positions, including some that you might be able to climb into if you curled up. Set an item inside one, it floods with what looks - and to anyone else, feels - like gravity-defying vantablack molasses, but that goo or forcefield withdraws when you reach your hand in again, allowing the item to be retrieved. A few already have something in them, from before you arrived.
>rolled 12, 2
Unsure what those contents might be.
>After that, she'll look around for EVA equipment since she'll likely be the one performing space walks. Drive halo exterior access seems the most likely starting point?
>rolled 12, 10
Steering a chainpod through the decontamination corridor isn't difficult, but it's a bit of a rollercoaster ride.
>>1119601
Down a pit, hit a flap which causes another flap just ahead to pivot out of the way, back up and across the other pit for folks coming from the opposite direction. Seems like it was designed to block direct line-of-sight while simultaneously preventing head-on collisions.
Then that narrow pinball tunnel abruptly opens up into the cargo bay, with only a thin steel tightrope underneath - chainpod mainly clinging to a groove in the ceiling. As spacious as those crew quarters seemed, they're like a tiny tongue on to the roof of a mouth that could swallow ten-story buildings.
Engine room door admits the chainpod as far as its equator, but gives a familar "access denied" honk https://questden.org/kusaba/graveyard/res/1034928.html#1039869 rather than allowing Paprika through. Interior is visible, though, dominated by six tall cylinders filled with swirling mist.
>>1119577
>Natalina will search the upper crew quarters, see if anything was left behind that might be of use,
There's a food dispenser, but all it seems capable of is a sort of... semi-translucent salmon-pink hockey puck. Ugh.
Paprika reports that she's found adequate sanitation facilities on the lower deck, including at least one pleasantly warm shower easily large enough for two people.
Dry puddles on the floor at first seem to be ordinary cloth - when touched by any sapient being, even indirectly through a rigid pole, they drape and flow normally - but then when released, the fabric instantly rigidizes. This rigidity seems to be a function of the room rather than the cloth, since it doesn't work when brought out to the cargo bay, but resumes upon return.
With the right setup that could be an almost ideal privacy curtain, even capable of deflecting thrown rocks, yet collapsing to reveal eavesdroppers who get too close.
Stack of hexagonal metal plates leaning against one of the walls turn out to be tables, and possibly also chairs. Whenever they're within 45 degrees of horizontal, anywhere inside the ship (or at least, in the crew quarters, entry hall, and navigation / comms room, since the plates are slightly too wide to fit through chainpod-only corridors), whichever edge is currently lowest acts like a hinge. Let go of one and it'll lay flat with an audible click, no matter how high off the deck.
>inability at understanding numenera
More complicated behavior when those plates are touching a wall or ceiling, which Nat hasn't quite figured out all the nuances of yet.
>rolled 20
Ceiling itself is initially blank, and almost painfully bright, but moderates and redecorates itself in response to certain gestures. Some of the resulting symbols are relatively persistent, but others rapidly decay, or modify adjacent symbols. https://thecodelesscode.com/case/184
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