Wolf's Garden
Your tongue feels fuzzy. Not the nice fuzziness of a kitten or a good scarf, more like the fuzziness on top of a mug of heavily sugared coffee that someone left out for a week or seven. You blink, vision blearily clearing. Your eyes don't feel much better than your tongue- pulsing with each heartbeat flaring with pain in time to the steady pulse of the strobing red lights. There's also a voice in your head, somewhat grating and barely intelligible to your sluggish mind.
"Warn. Gravity systems failing. Warn. Structural collapse detected. Warn. Emergency structural reinforcement shields failing. Warn. Life support systems critical. Warn. E-Coli detected in caferia cabbage supplies. Warn. Reactor room unsafe due to radiation leakage. Warn. All rooms adjacent to the reactor room unsafe due to radiation leakage. Warn. Safe room unsafe. Warn. Suicide rate of sapient beings on board has dramatically increased over the last hour. Warn. The fluid reprocessors are curre-" You tune out the monotone computerized voice of certain doom and assess your current situation. You feel monumentally hungover. You're in an upright position, with your arms and legs in rather sophisticated kinetic field restraints. A bit of testing reveals that you're not actually locked in, the restraints appear to be set to a resistance mode meant to keep you comfortably in position rather than bind you. Around you is a shell of metal and what appears to be glass, and there's a flickering HUD displayed on the inside. You have considerable difficulty getting your eyes to focus enough to read any of it without wanting to puke, but you can get the gist. You're in a stasis pod which is rapidly un-stasising due to fluctuations in the power supply. That's probably bad.
What's worse is that you have absolutely no memory of getting into a stasis pod.
Outside the stasis pod you can mostly see smoke, but in the red pulse of emergency lighting you can make out a hallway and you can see the glittering mirrored surfaces of other stasis pods around you. You briefly contemplate trying to fumble for the emergency catch, but the throbbing red exclamation points dancing around the stasis pod's external environmental monitor caution you that doing so would be a bad idea on par with high-fiving a live plasma conduit. Granted, the computer's warnings make staying put seem like an equally bad idea.
The weighing of your options between a fast and slow death is interrupted by a humanoid in a bulky environmental suit. Wreathed in smoke as he (she? it?) is, the bundles and spikes of the rescue-tech they've got on them look like jutting bones and animal skulls that they've tied to their suit with astrotape.
In your slightly incapacitated state, it's a funny mental image. Right up until they get close enough for you to see that the suited individual isn't packing rescue-tech. They actually have astrotaped a bunch of jutting bones and animal skulls to a space suit that they've also painted with a charmingly handmade thorny floral design. Around their waist and chest is belt a bulky set of ominous looking black cylinders. In their right hand is a dead-man's switch detonator.
"TWISTED ABOMINATIONS! HEAR ME! YOUR TIME IS AT AN END. YOUR FOUL MASTERS ARE DEAD. YOUR EVIL PURPOSE HAS BEEN BROUGHT TO NOUGHT. I AM THE THORN THAT PROTECTS THE ROSE. I WILL RETURN YOUR FLESH TO THE SOIL, AND WE SHALL NOURISH THE GREAT MOTHER TOGETHER!"There's just enough time to think 'Can we maybe not?' before they slam a suited thumb down on the detonator.
Liquid light explodes outward, freezing for a moment as burning green radiance coalesces around it- halting it a moment before it slams into your stasis pod and vaporizes you. Well, the cabbage might have E-Coli, but this room still has a working detonation management system.
"Warn. Detonation Management System failing in High-Value wing. Assessing solutions."You don't have time to feel good about being called 'High-Value' before the computer keeps talking.
"Intiating emergency Jettison. Impact with planet expected to be non-fatal in at least 50% of all cases. All subjects are adviced to remember that they are property, and should wait in an orderly manner for retrieval- should they survive. If you do not survive, you will not be punished for being scattered by the impact or by the depradations of native animal activity or the elements."There's no time to think before a heavy mechanical thud jolts your stasis pad to an angle and your kinetic restraints suddenly pulse to maximum strength- preventing you from so much as twitching. The green glow flickers, and the liquid light advances another foot in the flicker of an eyelash. Mag-rails whine around you, and the green glow wobbles a final time. It's the last thing you see before the acceleration of your cryopod being fired from a magnetic accelerator makes your vision flash red- then dead black.
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A little surprisinginly, you wake up. Your head throbs in protest from the G-forces the ship's computer just subjected it to, but the rest of your body now feels like it was victimized by a savage mob rather than a three day pub crawl. Your pod door is slightly ajar, the locks disengaged by emergency procedure after the pod ran dry of internal power. The air filtering in from the ourside is hot and dry, but perfectly breathable. Dazed, you push the pod door open the rest of the way and struggle to your feet.
You stand on top of a blackened pile of impact foam, degrading rapidly now that it's down with its duty of shielding your body during reentry. The mound is still about five feet in height, and provides a surpisingly good vantage point to survey the arid landscape. The earth is cracked and yellowed, streaked here and there with silver clay. Shoots of bulbous vegetation sprout from cracks here and there, and more than the occasional spined cactus pokes up from the ground. A tumbleweed blows briskly by. A seeded world.
The sky above is a pale and metallic shade of blue, and a giant crescent sun burns down with a harsh blue-white light. Either the sun decided to defy physics on a whim, or there's some form of solar shield- whether an artificial barrier or a fortuitously locked moon. Regardless, the blue sun is still hot as hell where you are. If it's shy of 570* degrees, it's not by much.
To the west rise ridges that slope at peculiar angles and gradually grow to form flat topped mesas like stoney thunderheads. To the east stretches more of the same arid terrain, with distant mountains barely visible against the haze. To the north the vegetation seems to grow very slightly more dense, and there's a glimmering suggestions of some kind of water on the horizon. To the south the the terrain looks much as the east, but without the promise of the mountains.
You have no water. You have no food. You're wearing what amounts to a onesie, designed to provide a conductive and insulative layer for the stasis pod to interact with, but not really ideal for much else. In a loose pattern around you are three other mounds of crushed and blackened impact foam, topped with a dead stasis pods. On top of those pods, much like you, are three other people stranded in the badlands with nothing but a onesie.
Well, at least you won't starve to death without getting the opportunity to embrace the alternative lifestyle of cannibalism.
*In the distant future, most everyone uses the Rankein scale. It's complicated.
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Taking four characters.
Name:
Description:
What's the last thing you remember doing before waking up in a stasis pod: (This can be fairly detailed or fairly brief. Just more than five words and less than 1000)
Attribute Ratings Spend 12 points. Each point gives +0.5 to your rolls in that domain.
[Power:] The raw brute strength you possess. A sledgehammer has power, a rhino has power, a lightning bolt has power.
[Speed:] How fast you can act, whether that be to move, to dodge, or to attack. A hummingbird has speed, a lightning bolt has speed, a blockade runner has speed
[Durability:] How much it takes to bring you down. A rhino has durability, a hydroelectric dam has duraility, a blockade runner has durability.
[Utility:] How good you are at helping people who aren't you. A hydroelectric dam has utility, a surgeon has utility, a shield has utility
[Projection:] How far or how many people you can effect. A sniper has projection, a wildfire has projection, the sun has projection.
Author
Topic: Wolf's Garden | 4/4 | [Sci-Fi] [Topless Bulgarian Engineering Fiction] (Read 2812 times)