I start my shift spawning inside the surgery room, the CMO checks in on the medical radio frequency, asking staff members to state their name and job. I promptly replied that I was a surgeon, and he says us (Roman just signed up as the Chemist) to wear a mask and gloves on at all times, and to stock up on essential medicines.
Then it dawned on me: I inadvertently doomed myself to inactivity for more than half of the game by choosing such a restrictive and situational job. -Not- blaming the CMO for this: his orders were legitimately IC given my qualifications and not at all restricting. But so I was IC bound, by myself, to not stray from medbay without good reason, unfortunately.
I resigned myself to twiddling my thumbs holed up in medbay and missing out all the fun, but little did I know that the Fun would have found me soon enough, after 'only' 2-3 hours.
I wasn't even sure what gamemode we were playing; when I've seen a sharply dressed gentleman (was the Lawyer, Donald Corleone) walk up to the chemist and offer him his personal protection and invite him to join his Family, I even suspected we were roleplaying a revolution.
After a couple of minutes, I'm sitting at the reception desk, and the Captain Oswald Black comes up, mistaking me for the CMO given my blue scrubs. The dialogue went like this:
Oswald Black asks, "Running a tidy medbay, I take it?"
Hector Petridis says, "Yes, sir"
Oswald Black asks, "Hm, what medical professionals are under your command again?"
Oswald Black says, "Oh wait."
Oswald Black says, "You're not the CMO."
Hector Petridis says, "I'm only a surgeon"
Oswald Black says, "You doctors all look so damn similar to me."
Bomrek Nussbaum says, "I've got Dr. Petridis and the Chemist"
Oswald Black asks, "I take it you have them on a tight leash?"
Bomrek Nussbaum says, "I'm trying sir"
Oswald Black asks, "I want you to get a genetic scan of me, CMO. Never know when one could die, eh?"
After the Captain was gone, I offered myself to scan and save the DNA of the CMO. He opens the door of genetics for me and enters the scanner, while I sit at the console; just as I'm about to save his data on disk.. the terminal goes offline.
I think it was a coincidence, but the timing was just perfect. We opt to try again later.
As we leave the room, medbay gets enshrouded in darkness. I get sent to grab the desk lamps from the arrivals lounge while CMO retrieves those from the library, and we place them whenever they're needed. We find a mysterious puddle of vomit in the lobby.
Then, the murders began. The Captain started screaming in horror over the radio. A cyborg stated that someone was killed in the dormitories toilets. I meet up again with CMO and he tells me of guts and gibs strewn all over the halls, with undetectable DNA. As I voice to him my concerns over the Captain whereabouts, he revealed to me that he was found killed, and his cloning disk generated only DNA-less blood in the cloning pod.
Someone left a welding tool on the reception desk. We are warned about an axe maniac roaming the halls.
I converse with Roman and decide that it's time to arm ourselves just to be on the safe side, with whatever we can find. He starts mixing up Mindbreaker Toxin, I collect the crowbar and the wrench and the syringe guns to be filled. Surgical instruments as weapons would have made sense, but not IC: I was trying to keep them sterile for patients, they would have had to be a very last resort. CMO orders over the dept radio the production of chloral hydrate.
The barmaid complains about the bar storage doors mysteriously welded shut.
Then, we finally hear him/it over the general radio. The unknown entity, with the first of many "R-r-r-rem-m-m-ember m-m-me?..." that would follow.
We know the axe murderer is in the kitchen, and security is on its way. The acting captain openly admits crewmembers are being murdered. As if it wasn't enough, there's a kudzu outbreak near the starboard.
Then medical fire alarm goes off by itself locking us in, and we hear the Welder talking directly to us, flickering in and out of sight in chemistry. Me and CMO are trapped inside the chem lab with the door mysteriously jammed, Roman goes to look for a toolbox while I start smashing the reinforced window next to the door with the crowbar, and manage to break it. But from the smaller prison of the lab we just went to the larger prison of the rest of medbay.
(You could think at this point, you have a crowbar, you can open firedoors. I am a newbie, I had no idea they worked with firedoors. The med main doors were jammed anyway. We could have gained access to the lobby by breaking the other chem lab windows, but at that point it was more practical to just break the west side windows to get out of medbay altogether.)
And the Welder returns, both in voice and in physical presence. Asking for help, lamenting how cold it is.
The A.I. SeRun warns us that no one has been in surgery in some time, and as we enter the operating room we find it covered in gibs, with a couple of notes I couldn't read in time.
The Detective comes up from the maintenance corridor and joins us, while CMO cleans the room, I stay on the doorway. The door of the operating theater opens by itself, Roman goes in to check, the entity whispers 'Come in..', the Detective tells us to run and I get the hell away. I hear him firing his energy gun as the doors of the surgery room and the operating theater suddenly shut, locking them inside while the air is being sucked out from the rooms. CMO and Detective manage to get out their internals, but Roman passes out from the lack of air.
The doors opens again, and we get him in a cryotube to recover; when he comes out he asks to lie down for a bit, I keep him company while we discuss the merits of tripping up on LSD before dying.
The four of us are looking for a way out now. We're right by the medbay doors when we witness Josiah Finch the Miner in the lobby getting cleaved and torched by the Welder, which was screaming 'THEY ALL LEFT ME'. We start screaming in rage and desperation at him while beating on the jammed door, blood and entrails appearing out of nowhere near us, included a gibbed xeno head. Roman tells me about having had visions of these strange creatures while he was knocked out and how they could have been connected to the fate of the Welder. It was a nice touch, another attempt to understand 'unknown'.
(Also, outside in the hallway appeared red graffiti saying CHZO, and that's when I realized that I was likely not getting some great reference to the Chzo mythos games, since I've never gotten around to playing the series but always wished to do so
)
The Welder vanishes, and the temperature dramatically drops in most of medbay.
The door opens again for us to recover the now critical Miner, that gets thrown into a cryo tube asap. As I'm monitoring him, the Welder says 'Behind you' and materializes right behind me, I run away and he starts wailing with his axe on the oxygen canisters and the freezer.
We spend some time in genetics and in the supply room where it isn't as cold as in the hallways. We get some biosuits (useless against the cold, but IC made sense to try to cover up).
The entity says "F-f-f-find m-m-m-me...". CMO retrieves and treats Josiah, I wreck the table near chem lab and start bashing with the crowbar the reinforced window on the west side. As I manage to break it down and clear the way, a stretcher with a mangled, unrecognizable mess of a body rolls up to us.
We bring it to genetics, since nothing was making sense anyway we attempt to clone him/her, to no avail. As I was talking over the radio, I see a figure with a scythe flicker behind me.
We put Josiah on a roller bed to carry him around and finally get out of medbay and meet up with Donald, who pried open the firedoors in the hallway.
We're heading to arrivals when Josiah wakes up, we find Whitaker Polson the HoP/acting CE building a wall with a secret door to keep the almost forgotten vines out. The growth is too fast for us, and even though we have welders to torch them we have no welding masks to protect our eyes.
As we're opting to go to the other end to the station, the Welder reappears and attacks Roman, who manages to inject him with LSD before being knocked unconscious. Josiah and Donald drive him away, respectively with fisticuffs and energy gun shots, and even get him to drop his axe.
Graffiti and runes kept appearing on the floor before our very eyes. Revived and healed Roman, we make our way to the escape wing near the chapel, while something's going down in engineering, with unknown now addressing directly the CE.
Me, Roman, CMO, and Josiah make it to the shuttle, and technically Donald, who was waiting outside guarding the doors. CMO informs us that the Detective is dead, we hear the acting Captain exclaim over the radio 'GOT HIM!', and Donald utter 'Coldsmith, you fool! Your death was to be at my hands!!'. The shuttle departs, leaving him behind.
As we land to safety, the mysterious figure with a scythe reappears, and we unceremoniously wail on him with whatever we got.
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Topic: Space Station 13: Urist McStation (Read 2122094 times)