Action: Follow tentatively
- Chester here. Nobody is inside, miss McGaw. Some assistance may be useful, in case of emergency. I mean, I'm entering one of the living buildings right now, and if the next thing you'll hear from me is screams, send more armed guys here.
Bust door open. If brute force is useless, shoot the lock.
You waste no time in acquainting the door with your boot. Inside, a long corridor with doors on both sides goes to the right and left of you. In front is a staircase to the second floor. There are larger doors at both ends of the corridor. The walls are lacquered wood, the colour of old honey. Again, a pang of nostalgia.
McGaw joins you in just a few seconds.
Damnit.
Load up, ready to move in.
You check the ammo counter on your Saigon, then get the battlesuit out of the trunk. It's made of several interlocking pieces: you're supposed to put the legs and arms on first, then lock the breastplate over them. You put it all on and straighten up. Whoa. It's like walking on stilts, but comfortable. You take several long, bouncy steps, then do a backflip, launching yourself several meters into the air. That's something, though the lack of a helmet makes you nervous. You put on your old one from the flak kit. Better.
The inside of the fort is empty and quiet. You note the lack of vehicles and the hover tracks leading out of the north gate. The silence, oddly enough, is comforting, like being wrapped in cotton fluff.
Build a second leg of awesomeness, the opposite of the one I already built.
Upload the specs to the sync program into the computer in my brain and delete any other record of it, also upload specs for my weapon arm and this leg and delete records of them as well.
Duplicating your work doesn't take you a lot of time, and soon you have two new legs. Then you go about enforcing your copyright, uploading everything into your head and destroying any data left. You monster. Don't you know Jonas Salk gave mankind the polio vaccine for free?
Try to get coffee from the thing, barring that check out the rest of the place and clean my rifle. No, not that kind you nasty-minded being.
I thought English was worse than Russian...
[5]You push the button on the machine, then take cover behind the bean crate and pray. It lets out a grumbling, bile-filled roar which turns into a fit of mechanical coughing noises, then cuts of abruptly with a sound like a muffled gunshot.
You poke your head out of cover tentatively. There's a cup filled with brownish foam, which miraculously turns out to be coffee. You gulp it down, then go off exploring.
The mess takes up the entirety of the fifth floor; it's a large, circular room with crates and container arranged to form tables and chairs.
The floors four, seven and eight are living floors, divided into sections with cardboard walls.
The third floor houses the medbay, with its surgery module and cabinets of medicaments.
The ninth floor is taken up by observation and meteorological gear, including a large telescope poking out of a port in the wall.
The sixth floor is mostly full of boxes, but there's also a smallish room occupied by a maniacal blue-haired teenager, who seems to be working on a pair of showy prosthetic limbs, giggling quietly to himself as he operates the laser cutter.
Nope, English is easy to learn as languages go - the only difficult thing about is are the tenses. Russian, however, has cases and places where you have to omit stuff and gendered nouns and other such things. It's very expressive when you do learn it, though.