Heh.  Good recovery on the gaffe.  More than okay for you folks to work shit like that into the story.  Frustrating half-memories surfacing is awesome...

"Yeah.  It's not like we have anything to lose... except the ship, bodily organs, my self-respect..."  She stared off in the distance for a bit, then shrugged.   "Tika.    let's go look at this emulsion restraint!"

She looked up at the ceiling and spoke, slightly louder. "Orishi--Ashe.  It is my understanding that the rolling brown-outs are a methodology you are using to preserve the crew, by maintaining sufficient life-support throughout the process.   Is this correct?"

Your Understanding is correct.  Rolling reboots allow for structured resets while maintaining environmental conditions for all organics on-board.  It is not as efficient as a hard reset, but does allow for shifting priorities.

"OK Gilly!"  Gothique says smiling and getting up and ready to go as this at least something she both understood and liked doing.  "Maybe we can brainstorm on how to get into the safe as well.  Unless we are in a rush to open it."  Her mind on next thing now knowing it is not a danger with the brownouts.

Gothique & Gilina

One of the MIRUs (Mobile Repair Unit) led them to a small chamber one level beneath the bridge.  There was a large cluster of pipes passing from the bridge above to the deck below. Various colors of the pipes, Gilina pointed out, represented different purposes, from communications, power, HVAC, waste and other systems.

The ship had been equipped with a redundant water-circulatory system that served multiple systems, but it was also designed such that ice could be harvested and siphoned from a holding area and brought into the ship's systems.  The water would be distilled by routing it through a portion of the impulse engines.  The trace elements would be filtered and redistributed to other areas, often into the drive-catalyst chamber where it would be exhausted in the drive plume.

However, the MIRU brought Gothique and Gilina to a forward section where a condenser coil collar had been set up over a fist-sized pipe that had standard markings for water.  But it ran beside another water-pipe.  It pulsed with a gentle blue and green alternating light that hummed with a standard cadence.

The pipe it was on was a more recent installation, which wasn't necessarily saying much.  The Orishi had seen several installations and revisions. Space-ships costing what they did, many were older than the people who flew them, and were patched and reservices, refit and requipped on a regular basis.

Deactivating the condenser coil and filter installation is a pretty simple job. The installation simply needs to be powered down.  You can probably even remove it without causing major problems, though there is some risk.

Is there anything you'd like to do or ask, or any precautions or post-cautions you'd like to observe?   I don't have any hard-and-fast plans here...
This message was last edited by the player at 06:25, Sat 12 Mar 2022.

Gothique was the type of person that does not second guess...no sadly she was the one that just did and while sometimes impulsiveness helped it was not always the fact.  That said that is what Gilly was for.  You know to curb her 'enthusiasm'.

"Have you ever thought about a mobile toolbox.  It may be handy for this situation.  But I guess we will have to rely on my handy dandy multitool."  She says as she literally pulls out a more futuristic version of the multitool.

She starts to work but pauses...why to make sure Gilly is not going to stop her.  If she seems fine she continues.

(All good was going to play by ear as well.  Gothique is not one for percautions.  I mean was so hard not to just make an attempt to break in the vault!)

Gilina shrugged.  "Had the whole shop on Ptolomen.  But when the shooting started, it was easier to hide behind it than drag it aboard." It was clear she wasn't terribly upset about it.  "It was nice, y'know, to get to finally work with a full shop of tolls and people who didn't assume that you knew nothing."

But, even then, she pulled a few tools out of the coveralls she'd been wearing.  "Only got what I got.  But there's a few more tools that were left around.  Still a fair bit to explore, I warrant."

Gilina hummed a little as she worked beside Gothique.  Within minutes, the clamp unit was separated from the water systems--without--breakage or leakage.

There was an audible sigh, a slight wind through the corridor they were in, then the sound of tinkling glass, like beads hung in the wind.

"Thank-you.  Emulsion flow has been reestablished.  Transformation matrices reinstated." Ashe said.


"Warning.  Foreign Autonomous Entities on-board, the presence of which prevents completion of the conversion process.  Cosines do not equate. Engine One and Engine two are out of alignment.  Entanglement paradox encountered.  Shifting.  Replacing stack three overload. Failure. Rebalance process added to repair queue. Accessing cache fourteen. Access granted.  Audio interface going offline in twenty seconds.

For our purposes, I'm still going to include Rayfe and Viper in this thread... post from wherever you like in the ship.  It's jut to be clear that it's not with Baylee.  Unless, of course, you went back to the meeting room, in which case you are with Baylee and should post there.

"Quick Miru, tell us the way to cache fourteen!", begged Viper.
"We could still communicate via display interfaces...", she commented while trying to connect her pad to the MIRU via the universal port.

"No, no, no while I was bored I made these."  Gothique says offering all the comm devices she has created which comes to a total of 5 so far.

"Did you need me to come with you as I am more than willing to help!"  Gothique puts device in her ear and looks between those there ready to run off and help or, "Or I can run and see what I can do about fixing the ship alignment.  As that may cascade into a much worse event!"

"She's got a pretty advanced AI."  Gilina said.  She took one of Gothique's comm units and popped it in here ear.  "I'll bet our jump-without-a-jump-drive did something.  But it's not condition red.  And if we're close to a place we can settle in and do the work...  Well, it's not going to hurt to go to the bridge or engineering and check the diagnostics.  But me, I'm curious about this cache fourteen, too..."

The MIRU unit chirruped and whirred away, leading them to an area aft of the impulse engines but forward of the drive exhaust converters.
Okay, yeah, I'm channeling the DRDs from Farscape, here

The MIRU stopped and circled an area of the floor.  They had to go into the ship's sub-systems, the space beneath the walkways, that was filled with pipes and conduits.   The slight pulsing sine-wave of the ship's engines and support systems were louder here, more obvious.  And it seemed filled with a light and irregular click-clack sound, of a bunch of hard-switches being turned off and on.

A small blue LED light had illuminated an area underneath the metal floor grating in this area of the ship, and it was clear that a section of the bulkhead had come apart, come off, or had otherwise been removed from the bulkhead proper.

Once the grating had been removed, it was obvious that the section removed was a clean cut and was not, in fact, damaged.  It appeared to have been a smuggler's cache, worked into the bulkhead itself and shielded from detection.   The blue-light illuminates the section underneath the grating but not the contents of the smuggler's cache.  Underneath the grating, it all looked slick and greasy, or sweaty.  possibly a result of humidity.

It reeked badly, though.  The sort of smell of rotten fruit and decayed and moldy cardboard.

Viper' there.  Gothique and Gilina?  Your call where you want em.

Gothique as soon as the smell hit her face contorted into a 'yucky' look.  She had experience with scents before but this was something else.  Still she had not lost her lunch yet which was a good thing at the moment.

"If you need me too I will go in there and check it out fully." She says not really wanting to volunteer but also knowing someone has to.  "But only if I get a promise if we ever get water I get to discover what it is like to take a bath!"  She suggests before not even giving a chance to answer and heading inside.

At that point she pulls out her multitool she was working on complete with 'mag' light and turns it on!

"I wonder if we'll discover a dead monkey holding fruits, who hid there and died of suffocation", Maissa discusses with Gilina. "Would it be a moral teaching about sharing?"

Under the walkway, there was perhaps three feet of clearance.   Most of it was empty space, but conduits and pipes ran the length.   Inset in the outer bulkhead was a chamber approximately five feet long by two feet wide and another two feet deep.  A smuggler's clutch.  The hatch to which was lying on the sub-corridor's floor, covered in brownish and blackish grime.

The grime stunk to high heaven.

Inside the smuggler's clutch was moe of the brown and black grime mixed with a substance that resembled a tan-colored tapioca-like pudding.    From the midst of the pudding-grime there were perhaps four or five clusters of shards of brilliant colors.  There were neon pink shards and robin's egg blue and lime green among others that seemed speckled.

As Gothique leaned forward to take a closer look, her knee touched on something wet, wedged between the lowest lip of the smuggler's clutch and the sub-corridor's floor.

A dead rodent, maybe.  Rats--or something like them--it seemed, were everywhere.  Whatever it was, it appeared to have been turned inside out... or perhaps it had simply been relieved of it's outer coat.  What remained was mass of bloody pulp, cold to the touch and still vaguely viscous.

Looking around as best she can as well as the smell not helping she tries to figure out what it is...that is until her knee touches what it touches.  Then and only then she lets out the, "Ewwwww, ew, ew, ew, ew, It is gross down here. "    She then uses her mag light to look around and see what she can see.

A small detail that might register... the technicolored shards in the smuggler's compartment appear hollow.  Not so much crystals as... eggs?

--
OOC: hey, it's an alien thing.  What the hell do I know about alien biology?

Also, it was only one inside-out rat.  The "there were rats everywhere" comment was more to suggest that it's just an unavoidable fact of life.  Rats are everywhere.
 Every world, every ship, every location has it's vermin.

Gothique makes a face and scoops some of whatever it is and brings it out and she is unsure what it is.  "OK someone sciencey take this away."  She says before stopping.  "Oh wait am I the sciencey one?" She asks hoping someone else volunteers.

It is then her mind looks a bit more curious at it.  That is when, "Does anyone have a container so I can study this?"

"Study it? Are you a scientist on the top of being an engineer?" marveled Maissa. The M'rshaan was full of surprises ! It its owner wanted a sex doll, why would he have wanted one who was also a genius, and gave her an education? Either what Gothique's owner really wanted was a mistress with whom he could engage in a high-level conversation, or a daughter he could entrust with his fortune... or a butler. Yes. The kind who does everything, in order not to disturb her master's game of cards.

"Look Gothique;", Maissa started, irritated. ""this is not an authorized material on board. This rubbish must be cleaned, not studied. Don't start to examine an alien bio-hazard on the ship, do it in a secure xeno-lab. In... less than four hours, we'll reach K-Zino and they must have that kind of labs over there. Meanwhile, we'll drown this place with bleach."
This message was last edited by the player at 17:32, Thu 07 Apr 2022.

Gothique's excitement to a new discovery about herself was dashed as the wind was taken out of her sails.  And it shows as her ears do exactly what a cats does when it knows it has done bad.

"I am sorry Maissa.  I will get the stuff and start cleaning it up."  She says as she moves off to go find the cleaning supplies and unless stopped returns with the bleach as requested as well as mop and other things.  One of them being an invention obviously of sorts.

"I call this the disenfector.  It burns and sucks up super fast so getting all things germy and icky!"  Seems while losing the ability to study the material is gone her chance to try a new toy was available.  It looked kind of like a shop vac but much fancier and an attachment that probably looked like a Bissell steam cleaner.

Maissa put on gloves and a bio-hazard helmet. The helmet filters smelled, but stank not as much as the cache, so it was a respite. The pilot-turned-multi-functional-maid unrolled some solid garbage bags and, with the tip of two brooms, transferred the rat's corpse into the bag without ever coming close to it.

Then she assisted is vacuuming the slime. Gothique's invention was noisy, leaking, and needed to be emptied frequently into the bags. But it did the work - until it broke down. They paused from time to time to pick up the crystalline eggs and drop them off in a garbage bag of a different color.

When the cache's thickness of slime had diminished, she joyfully sprayed it with bleach and let it soak.

Then Maissa brought the bags and Gothique to the nearest airlock. She remotely oriented the ship, so the airlock opening faced Deux Prime, the nearest star of this dual-star system. Then of course the females left the airlock, and opened the door to the space (you can't open both door simultaneously; at least one of the doors must be securely locked). Some air rushed out and the garbage started their free fall into the star.

Maissa explained : "Gothique, remember the Stars are the source of all life and all energy. Without the rays of this system's star, we'd die.". The young pilot then opened up to her protégée and recited the appropriate mantra for the action : "Mother Deux, we're only insects crawling at your arm's reach, not too close to your wraith, not too far in the iced Void. We return to You some things we do not need, so it may feed your fusion cycle for the billions of years. Amen."

The remains of the rat and the small outgrowths of shattered crystal got sucked up quick enough.  And the disinfectant aboard the ship was industrial grade.

The crystals themselves were brittle and shattered into little fragments when touched.

A couple of them appeared to have a furry kind of mold on the bottom of them, a likely resting place for whatever was in them, incubating, perhaps?

Oh, this isn't over.  This is just foreshadowing...  but I can be patient...

The look on Gothiques face is a bit confusing but waits and listens out of sheer respect and somewhat awe.  This person seems to hold a conviction she is sure she never has.  Even after she is done she still has a look of confusion but turns and smiles as if guessing the answer and wanting it to be said so not to offend.  "Amen?"

In her head she is pretty sure...actually she is not sure what she believes in and for now this will be what it is.

Maissa put the strange life-form in a sealed container, such as a can of paint.
"Let's show that to the captain. It's always good to show and tell that you did some work. Also, I'd like to know how the recruitment process is going. Let's see how Baylee booted Killer Karin out of the airlock, and recruited the unnamed guys!"

She passed by Rayfe to suggest he followed them to the meeting room.

Gothique still confused by some that is being said but still not wanting to upset her new friend follows but does ask, "Why would wone need to show.  Would their work not be noticed....."  She trails off as they head to the meeting room.