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 Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:08 pm
Guy got up and followed suit, exiting the train with the girl.
The made their way to the teleportation lab entrance, and immediately stopped. Security barricades were in place, with bodies of lab techs and scientists scattered around, along with a few guards. Two guards remained, firing sporadically into the labs.
When they noticed, one of them turned around, his face slick with sweat, his eyes filled with fear.
"Thank the Emperor you got here! They sent the rest of the flame troops in an hour ago, they got wiped out by those things! They were taking them to the research labs before it got quarantined, and they broke loose! They're some kind of mutated monsters they grabbed off an old space station!"
Guy took it all in, analyzing the information. He'd heard of the station in question, locked down for decades. The mutants were supposedly human once...
"We have to get inside. We're going in," he told them. "Cover us."
The guards laid down covering fire as the pair entered the labs, finding destruction and death inside. there was no signs of anything hostile...
"Be on the lookout. These things are deadly, so I've heard."
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:23 pm
Persephone nodded, the soft whirring of her eyes as they applied a filter to her vision the only sound she made for a moment. This whole mission was turning out to be a disaster, she was realizing quickly-- she likely wouldn't get paid near enough for all this trouble. It was better than the alternative, though, she supposed, and in one smooth motion, she freed her guns from within her coat, readying them almost resignedly.
She had a reputation among the Rebel forces as being a bit temperamental--new recruits were usually told to avoid her until she approached them herself, and even some of the veteran soldiers were reluctant to deal with her, and this was precisely why. When Persephone decided she didn't like the way things were going, she became even more dangerous than usual; she wouldn't hesitate to spring at anything. Come on, she thought, peering around the area once again. Just give me something worth my time... Make it worth all this work.
She studied a closed door for several moments, hoping to pick out a structural anomaly that would suggest that something had tried to break through it, or a hidden camera, or anything, really...
After a few seconds, however, she turned her attention elsewhere, not finding anything worth investigating further. "How far are we from this teleporter we're supposed to be getting to," she asked Guy finally.
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:32 pm
Guy shrugged.
"We aren't very far away. We just have to hope that all the fighting didn't damage the teleporter at all. They're dangerous enough as is."
They advanced deeper into the labs, and finally, the mutants came. Human-like, crawling on all fours, with no skin, which showed wet muscles and meat as they moved, they charged forward, howling and screeching as they came. Guy leveled his flamethrower and burned them to ashes.
He noticed the girl was shooting too, but the sight of the things clearly bothered her.
"We have to press forward, lets go!"
He started walking forwards, burning a path through the hordes of creatures, heading towards their goal.
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:21 pm
In an almost surprising gesture of submission, Persephone let Guy take the lead, falling in just a couple feet behind him to offer protective fire and cover them both. They made their way through the mess, shooting, burning, and hacking their way through the mutants in their path.
By the time they had made it clear of the horde, Persephone was nearly ready to vomit-- between the sight of those... Things when they were alive, the blood and guts, and the sight of them being burned to a crisp, she was more than a little disgusting.
"I've seen a lot of nasty things, but that..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "I really hope we don't see many more of those things."
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:26 pm
"It must be a small infestation. We should be clear of them soon," he said.
And just like that, there were no more. They made their way to the teleporter room, where the massive machine stood waiting. Everything seemed undamaged, save for the dead lab techs lying around. Guy went to the console and started up the system. It would take about twenty minutes for it to warm up and activate.
"I hope this thing is safe. They hardly work right on a good day....," Guy muttered.
He turned back towards the girl.
"Make sure you put on one of the rebreather helmets. These teleporters can kill you if you aren't in one, seeing as how you have no idea where you may end up."
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:31 pm
Persephone looked at the helmet in question almost disdainfully. "I hate hats," she muttered to herself, and slipped it on, forcing herself not to panic as the sudden change in the lighting and range of vision nearly caused her cybernetic eyes to go haywire.
Once she had everything back under control, she looked over to Guy, who nodded to her, and she stepped into the device itself before he followed suit. In a flash of light, they were gone...
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:35 pm
There was a brilliant flash, then they were...somewhere else...
They emerged from the crackling gate of light into another dimension, a set of broken asteroid like rocks, floating in rings, stacked several dozen high, floating in space. He could see another gateway, and reasoned it must be the way out.
The only problem was, it was at the bottom of the curious rock rings, floating in dead space. If they missed...floating off into space and waiting to die would be a fate too horrible to think of...
He jumped experimentally. Even in heavy armor, he went about four feet in the air, before landing softly.
"Low gravity...strange places...This is some kind of alternate dimension, or at least a small part of one..."
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Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:47 pm
Persephone shook her head. "This isn't right," she muttered, then watched Guy jump about four feet in the air as though he was testing their surroundings.
"Low gravity... Strange places... This is some kind of alternate dimension, or at least a small part of one," he said thoughtfully.
"So, forgive me for stating the obvious, but the teleporter didn't work, then," Persephone said. "Fantastic." She sighed heavily, carefully adjusting her vision so as not to send her eyes into a frenzy, since she obviously couldn't remove the helmet.
"Just so you know, as long as I have to leave this helmet on, my vision is going to be rather diminished... Any headwear that restricts a person's field of vision this much can really mess with a person with cybernetic eyes... I can see alright, just... Well, I suppose it's more like a normal person's vision than what I'm used to. The change affects my depth perception as well, though... So I may need your help." She was suddenly grateful for the helmet-- it meant Guy wouldn't be able to see her cringe as that last sentence left her lips.
"That gate down there must be our ticket out of here... But how in the world do we get to it? It's just... Floating."
She searched within her coat briefly for anything that might be useful, but found nothing. Mentally scolding herself for never having thought that she might at some point in her career need a rope, she kicked at a small space-pebble, watching it float away in a manner that really did very little to satisfy her.
"I suppose we could try jumping... But what do you suppose would happen if we missed?"
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Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2011 7:42 pm
Guy gave the portal below another look.
"I would imagine it would involve floating away until you suffocated or starved to death," he finally said.
He looked around, save for some odd plant life and a few creatures on far away rocks, there wasn't anything of note. At least nothing was trying to kill them...
"We have to jump, its the only way. We can't just stay here forever."
He clamped his flamethrower to his chest in preparation to jump. It had been along time since he'd done any sort of long fall such as this, and they never got any better....
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Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 5:17 pm
"Oh no... You're not leaving me here by myself," Persephone told him pointedly. "If I miss this portal and spend all of eternity floating through space, you'd better be damn sure I'm not doing it alone."
She stepped up directly beside him and held out her arm. "Besides... This way, if we miss, maybe one of us can grab hold of something and pull the other to safety."
Surely, she thought to herself, Guy would have to see that she was right... That, and she simply didn't want to take the risk of being abandoned to float aimlessly in space. If there was personal risk for her, she wanted to be certain that there was equal risk for him-- after all, survival was the name of the game.
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Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 6:18 pm
Guy took her hand, and didn't give her a moment to think before he jumped, pulling her with him. They fell for a long time....right into the portal.
There was a blinding flash of light, and they appeared in a different, yet familiar lab setting. Guy stood up, smoke curling off his armor.
"I would rather not do that again. I have a problem with such things."
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Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 6:54 pm
Persephone chuckled. "With what? Falling through space or holding hands with a girl?"
She took a few steps away from him and looked around cautiously. She didn't see any immediate threats in the vicinity, however, so her normally stiff posture relaxed slightly-- but not enough to keep her from looking on-edge about something still.
"Where are we now, do you suppose," she asked, one hand tucked inside her coat, ready to grab a weapon at a moment's notice...
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Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 7:25 pm
If Guy hadn't been wearing armor that gave him the strength to crush someone's head with a slap, he would have smacked her upside the head. He pointed at the signs plastered everywhere.
"We are where we are supposed to be. The quarantined section of the labs. Now, all we have to do is find the data core room, and download the data we need. That should take a long time, because they most likely have years worth of data stored on them."
He freed the flamethrower just in time, as the howls of mutants preceded them by a few seconds, before a horde of them burst in through vents, doors, and windows. There were so many of them, he figured they had to have found the main nest of them....
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Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 7:52 pm
"Damn," Persephone muttered, and whipped out her guns once again. "This can't just be easy, can it?" She turned her attention first to the vents and windows, hoping to take out as many of the mutants there as she possibly could-- the vents were a confined area, which was a bit of a double-edged sword, as far as she was concerned. Yes, it made it easier to hit your target, but because the area was so narrow, she knew it could at times seem like a never-ending battle.
She hadn't had the chance to ask Guy whether or not he thought they were in the right dimension this time, but that was, quite frankly, the least of her worries right now-- her survival instinct had kicked in, since they were so vastly outnumbered, so she simply wanted to take out as many of these mutants as was humanly possible.
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Posted: Tue Sep 06, 2011 8:26 am
After over two hours of hard fighting,Guy and Persephone reached the data core room. Amid more fighting, and the howls of gunfire, explosions, and the mutant creatures, they successfully managed to sift through several years worth of stored data to find what they needed: the cure to Saul's infection.
As Guy was backing his way out of the network, he saw a set of massive data files marked urgent. He opened it, ignoring the sounds around him, and checked it out. What he found was amazing.
The Delta Labs scientists had finally made themselves useful in some regard, and this definitely made up for the mess they had had to clean up. Schematics for hundreds of thousands of types of advanced cybernetics, the formulas for an advanced compound that eliminated rejection and other symptoms caused by the older models used by most of the Empire...this was truly a breakthrough.
Guy turned around, and hosed down advancing mutants with his flamethrower, and turned back around. The file set had been meant to be sent to Medios, to the Lord Surgeon General...
Guy uploaded the files to the planetary transmission network, and they were beamed through the vastness of space to the recipient. Hopefully when he noticed the tag on the message, he would get a hold of Guy and offer some kind of reward....
Guy finally turned to the girl, who thankfully, was running out of targets at last. He hosed the last few down with flames, and the room was finally quiet, save for the dying breath of several beasts, and the crackle of flames as they consumed corpses.
"We did what we came here to do. I even got one hell of a bonus that requires my immediate attention. I have to make a trip to Medios."
As if on cue, the room blew in, and Imperial Soldiers rappelled down from a gunship hovering overhead. One of them turned to face Guy, while the others disarmed the girl.
"Sir. We have orders to extract you both to the hanger bay for immediate departures. You are to not come back to this planet again, or orders from High Command."
Guy nodded, and the girl was put aboard the gunship, and he made sure to claim her weapons as his own, so that he might give them back to her.
Several hours later, they were left where they had first met, by the cargo lift leading to the starport. Guy handed her her weapons and equipment.
"Well, we made it. Time to go our separate ways, I suppose," he said.
He hadn't had an idea of the impact his transmission to Medios had made. Once the data had been downloaded, tested by the factories of Medios, and tried out, it would change the galaxy for the better, forever.
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