GroupsConvenient link to the Master List.Present and Accounted - Vlad, Qwerty, Roy, Shideh, Andrezj, Serg and Rosetta
As long as everyone is gathering up tools and supplies, Simon remembers that there's another space suit back with the terrarium module. He's sure he can make it through the storm, and takes off. Naturally, no one hears from him again. After a half hour, a garbled message comes over the radio that might be Simon, but there's no way of knowing now.
Meanwhile, the group sets to work on the most obvious thing to build, a proper airlock to get in and out of the rover without wasting a lot of oxygen. Andrezj borrows a pressure suit from Dr. Saberi, and together with Roy, Vlad, and Qwerty turn the greenhouse material into a locking connector. Although quick to add her own advice and critique of the job, Serg does little except sketch out ever grander long term plans of construction.
It's a sloppy job. First, Rosie helps hotwire a water pump to suck air out of the little office, through a hole that had to be punched in the wall and sealed back up with mud and glue. The hallway takes nearly all of the original material to make a sturdy enough structure. And establishing a proper seal against the rover requires wrenching the walls together and dabbing more glue around. In all, it's not a perfect system, but it will let people move in and out of the rover freely, detach it to drive around, and use the airlock the way the name implies. Hopefully, a more permanent solution can be built once the group has some proper tools and can scour the wreckage.
Still not satisfied, Qwerty and Roy get out on the rover, tethered to hold themselves against the wind, and try to fix the radio. Fortunately, the antennae just broke off when it rolled, and some scrap metal off the ground works well enough as a replacement. Just in time, Trippy sends out another message.
Sean's been watching the weather, and his robots think the storm will lighten up soon. That's the good news. On the other hand, there's been no word from Simon. Also, there has at last been word from Dietrich Sacharov. He kicked around one of Sean's bots before keeling over and suffocating. Without him, there are now 21 confirmed survivors on Mars.
Present and Accounted - Pitor, Harry, Strife, Tetsuo, Augusta, Vernon, Louise, and Geoffrey
The roving crew inspects the Reactor Module for anything they can do with it at the moment, but the looming dust storm makes long exploration dangerous. Strife leads the look around – since the reactor was so important to the mission, it was built extra strong to survive the landing. Strife thinks it should be easily repaired once rolled over. How is another matter. Louise's suggestion of pulling the reactor out quickly proves unworkable, as it's less a piece of equipment than the bulk of the module itself. Rolling the module over with the Auger could work, but there's no cables on hand to do it with.
Any option will have to wait. Strife convinces Tetsuo and Louise to help him pull the corpses out and give them a quick burial in the sand. Word comes along via Trippy that Sean's metering indicates the storm will take a while to pass over. With no air here at the reactor, there's no more reason to stay. The Engineering Module would be the wisest place to hold up for now, so everyone piles back onto the Auger.
Getting everyone back inside is a tricky and arduous process, since the closest thing to an airlock at the moment is a metal box that has to be re-glued with every use. Naturally, some air is lost. Once inside, it's clear the Module is not a long-term shelter. While the CO2 scrubber can keep the air breathable, there's no power except what everyone can supply with the hand-crank. The half-dozen engineers in the room spend some time calculating whether the exertion is putting more CO2 in the air than the scrubber is removing, but no consensus is reached. There's also no food, which gets a little worrying.
Harry meanwhile spends a couple boring hours watching dust swirl around his windows. Short of welding his cabin to the Module, no one can think of a safe way to get him out. Just passing a suit in to him as quick as possible could work, but there's no harm in waiting for the storm to die down before trying.
Time passes with hollow conversations about what to do next. After an agonizing wait, Trippy radios out again. Sean thinks the storm is lightening. It might just be an eye passing over, but if there's anything to be done outside, it should be calm for a while. Distressingly, Dietrich Sacharov finally turned up. Just long enough to croak on camera after beating up one of Sean's robots. Mars has claimed another life - that makes 21 confirmed survivors without him.
Bored and ticked off, Squeegy handles the dust storm and lack of movement options the only reasonable way – he crashed in a flight chair to take a nap.
Faris is still restless though, and racks his brain for anything else to be done. After running though several makeshift breathing apparatus plans and rescue scenarios, it occurs to him that the lifeboat itself must have a rudimentary air system. Sure enough, prodding through the walls turns up a small air supply and a simple fill/release valve tied to damage control. Carefully prying it all loose and comparing parts, Faris sets to work again.
After some tinkering and desperate scrounging, he manages to rig the system to the partially dismantled space suit. It's basically just an extra air tank with a hand valve, and can't remove CO2 like a rebreather. Instead it just ups the oxygen and air pressure to balance out waste gas, but it's better than the couple minutes of breathable air the suit would have held otherwise.
So, with one usable, if fragile, space suit, there's a new option to leave the lifeboat. As luck would have it, Trippy comes on the radio again. The storm should be weakening soon.
Desperate to do something constructive, Kallev insists on poking around the big refrigerator and the hallways outside it. Silver puts the kibosh on that as quickly as he can, since the hallways can't hold any air. Kallev is left to fume and fidget.
Thinking his behavior a bit rash, Silver gives him a once over. From Kallev's rambling thoughts and shaking body, Silver sailor's experience tells him he's hypothermic and possibly in shock after running though the wicked cold temperatures outside. However, theres not much to be done in a big icebox about heating him back up. Silver tries setting the thermostat as much as he thinks it will go, piles some wrappers around Kallev, and leans against him in a total secure-with-heterosexuality way.
Nothing else to do and rather disinterested anyway, Silver proposes eating some more and resting. Kallev tries to stay warm with the instant heat packets he can find.
With the monitoring robots hunkered down in the storm and managing their affairs, you're once again left with time, spare parts, and a new to keep busy. Back to work on the megabot then.
How many arms? As many as you can combine. Wheels? Lots of wheels. Lights, extra cameras, all the power supply and solar collectors you can cram on, enough motors to move it all. Wanting something to do himself, you idly chat with Trippy and Harry, the only other voices on the radio now with all the interference in the air. Work goes on. You wonder as you make a few crucial welds how much air is left in the lab and how much you're using, but you don't have any other options now.
As you near something like completion, another voice comes over the radio, broken and halting. It comes with a visual – you jump to the console to see what one of the bots sees. Someone in a space suit is wandering around in the storm. Between the static and the man's croaking voice you can just barely make out what he's saying.
“Cha... Chacun... Vous les bâtards m... ma... m'avez omis ici inte... inten... tenio... Je vous tuerai pour cela! Juste la v... v... ma' tu...”
The rest is incoherent noise, as the man starts throwing weak punches at the bot. After a couple minutes of watching this slow fury, you see him finally stumble and fall for the last time. Telling Trippy about it, he goes silent for a moment, then says it sounds like Dietrich Sacharov. He was the first person Trippy heard after the crash, but he ran off out of range somewhere hours ago. Seems Dietrich finally found his way back. You try to put it out of your mind, and get back to work on the robot.
At last your engineer's instinct tells you the robot is as complete as it's going to be for now. A masterpiece of improvisation, a marvel of ingenuity. Well, really it's a shambling heap of motors and aluminum tubing, like a cross between an electric wheelchair and a bear skeleton. But it's functionally sound, and as powerful a tool as you can make it. Now, what to do with it...
You check the weather data from the observers. You wouldn't know weather patterns from crop rotation, but the limited intelligence of the bots includes enough programing to analyze their own metering. They think the storm system is dieing down or blowing past. It might instead just be the eye of a very large storm about to pass overhead. At any rate, you relay the news to Trippy and Harry.
As long as everyone is gathering up tools and supplies, you may as well run back to the terrariums and grab that other space suit. Surely you can make a quick hike and get back before the storm blows in.
Turns out, no. Right as you get to the other lab, the wind, despite the near nil density, picks up enough to knock you off your feet. You try to radio back your distress, and to say that you can't make the return trip now, but the radio is nothing but static. It's a struggle just to get inside - going back out carrying a space suit with you is out of the question.
So you settle in for the time being, tending to the critters after leaving them for a few hours. They all seem to be rebuilding their little dens quite nicely. It occurs to you that you'll have to arrange for taking care of them over the long term somehow, and letting another rush of air out of the module every time you open the door will be problematic at least.
Time passes. Without opening the door again, there's no real way of knowing what the weather's doing. On your own anyway. After another hour or so, you can hear a broken radio signal that sounds like Trippy. You can't quite make out what he said, but it sounded like he was talking about the storm.
As little as there was to do in the Observation Pod before the storm rolled in, there's even less now. Only Sean, Harry, and the Lifeboat can still maintain radio contact, and Faris disappears into some project of his. Sean does likewise but is at least conversational while doing so. Harry is just bored, and by extension irritated. There's also not much to talk about. The crash is the elephant in the room, with a few tentative theories offered on what could have caused another catastrophic failure in a Mars landing. And of course there's the grizzly question of who else might be alive.
Ironically, you get to find out. Sean's work is interrupted by another radio signal, near one of his robots. He says it's a crazed man in a space suit speaking what he thinks is French. The man tries breaking the robot it found. Then falls over. Then he stops talking. It sounds like Dietrich Sacharov finally found his way back into radio range, wherever he was, but not soon enough to save himself. By your count, that makes 21 people still alive on Mars.
A long, hollow silence fills the radio for a while. Then Sean says he's about to send his newly completed custom robot outside. The weather monitors on his observatory bots suggest the storm is about to lighten up. You relay the news on to the other groups. Just in time to hear it, you hear word from Andrezj outside the Hydroponic Lab that he's repaired the radio on the mission rover.
Luckily, in a space as large as the Habitat Module, there's a couple foam extinguishers around for just this occasion. Running all over the module for a few minutes, you don't so much put fires out, as just keep them from spreading until they burn themselves out. The entire electrical system is trying to short at once like a bad Star Trek episode, keeping everything around wires or a terminal smoldering. Finally, you either get the system under control or it just runs out of juice, and you take a more thorough look around without the imminent danger.
The Module is completely trashed, laying on a hill, and nearly cracked in half. It's amazing the pressure hasn't popped it open yet. What's almost as amazing is that you look to be the only survivor. You can't quite match up enough smears and parts to say exactly how many other people almost made landing with you, but it looks like about a dozen.
With the adrenalin dieing down, you find a mirror to check your own damages. Your face is certainly burned, first degree, maybe second in places, along with some missing hair. Shaking your joints out says you took a bad fall just as expected, but everything is working well enough to move. The air in here might be your biggest worry. It's hard to breath, and you throat and chest still feel on fire themselves.
Naturally, getting out is the obvious answer, but there's nowhere in the Habitat Module that would normally have an environment suit to leave in, and you haven't found an errant one yet. Using a radio or any other device is still subject to catastrophic electrical shorts. You ponder making your own solution, but the wealth of military grade housewares and debris doesn't exactly present an answer...
Dietrich has now been confirmed dead. The storm is still messing up radio communication.
The Next TurnTo make up for taking three weeks to write a couple of paragraphs saying “yeah stuff happened like you expected”, the next turn will be one hour, during which time, you will succeed at whatever you try. This ain't no RTD, so plausible actions only please, but anything you think you can accomplish with one hour in a Martian shipwreck, go ahead. Ask me about any specifics, I'll try to accommodate everything I can.
Sean – You're welcome to name your new robot. Megabot is pretty lame.
To ease up on bookkeeping slightly, I've elected to remove the Current Mood indicator for characters. Nobody was really reflecting them anyway, which stands to reason – you can't get much more railroading than insisting people feel a certain way. Mental status comes across well enough in the descriptions as is without me having to bother assigning it a value in the list. I'm strongly considering doing the same with the relationship lists. At this point, it doesn't really serve any purpose except pointing out who's in contact, and once everyone is gathered together, or just next turn, I'll probably drop it for all the same reasons.
I'd like to point out that most of the heavy engineers have gathered together with an air factory and a big drill at one end of the wreckage, and most of the scientists have gathered together with a greenhouse and a big truck at the other. I never had a plan or intention for these groups and equipment to come together like that, it just kind of happened. So congratulations I guess.
Other corrections will go here as they inevitably arrive.
Yeah delays, whatever. Enough has been said.
For anyone who remembers and gives a damn, a while ago I said I was in danger of vanishing off the Internet, permanently and without warning. Well, crisis averted. I could still be hit by a bus or something, but I have nothing in particular to worry about now.
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Topic: Angry Red Planet - Totally And Completely Dead (Read 48080 times)