VIDEO; DECEMBER 17

[neveroutwrenched]

[Only a few hours out of a two week cryo sleep, Ratchet feels like he's waking up to an entirely different ship. The corridors are empty and dark, and the usual steady hum of smoothly working ship is distant at best. Manesseh's message was a startling first communication, adding only more questions (and concerns) to the pile. He was groggy, he was hungry, he was freezing his ass off...and looks exactly that happy in the MID comm, although he tries to force a somewhat positive note into his voice, despite the hunched shoulders and shivering.]

So I noticed....uh, I noticed it's a little chilly on the ship. [An awkward pause.] And also that one of our captains is dead...

[A longer pause there as he hesitates, trying not to sound irreverent.  He hadn't known the Captain in question, but it didn't make her death any less serious.  When he does continues his voice sounds strained.]

Does anyone want to help fill me in here? Power's still on the fritz, there's maybe someone killing people, with a particular taste for the captains, and there are a....lot of...cats? Am I missing anything? Does anyone want to tell me what the heck is going on?

Comments

[peridork]

[She glances around, looking conspiratorial, and then leans in closer, hissing at a whisper:] I think... that this monster came from one of those locked rooms that we aren't supposed to go into.

[neveroutwrenched]

You think the captains just kept a dangerous monster - or whatever it is - in a locked room on the ship, and their total security measure was a locked door and telling us not to open it?

[He's skeptical, yes, but not so much so that he thinks she's wrong.]

[peridork]

It's the only thing that makes sense! I already told you that it can't have come from one of the planets we've docked at, and its appearance coincides perfectly with the power fluctuations!

[neveroutwrenched]

Okay, but why? Why would they keep something they knew was this dangerous on the ship?

[peridork]

I don't know, why would they keep a bunch of stolen statues on the ship? [ She's extremely adamant that she's right about this. ] I get the sense sometimes that even they don't know what's behind half of those doors.

[neveroutwrenched]

Yeah. I get that feeling too. [And in no way was it a comfort.]

I asked Than about the statues, and got a pretty vague answer. Like always. I can't tell if it's on purpose or if they're trying to be misleading, but it's frustrating either way.

[peridork]

Well that's not surprising. They wouldn't give me much information on the power issues, either. Even though I was offering to use my considerable skills to try and fix up this junk heap!

[Mind, in reality that's not entirely true; they did give her some information. It just stopped being sufficient after a certain point, and then she'd begun to complain about it, and they started to ignore her. Peridot considers this a personal insult worth complaining about.]

Look, the point is, we know that the locks on those rooms are electronic, and the ship barely has enough energy to keep life support online as it is! So either it somehow boarded the ship from the vacuum of space without setting off any alarms, or it came from inside the Moira.