“Makes sense,” the Knight had murmured as she dutifully went about her task of replacing every single device on the surface. Unfortunately it meant suffering a few more strikes with each trip, so the process took days as opposed to hours, but she was alive if a bit more under the weather than when she started.
All worth it though, she repeated in the back of her mind as though it were some protective mantra in its own right. It wasn’t, obviously, but it kept her spirits up and she was eventually able to get them all replaced.
Now settled inside the EBS control room, she safely grounded and into day two of trying to click her way through the commands despite all of it being in an alien language. She tried to logic things out, but that only got her as far as getting into the system, and she hadn’t been able to get anything to work past that. Nothing that really mattered, anyway. More lights over the work desks and a few unlocked doors, cabinets, and drawers here and there. She made a mental note to see about how and why those things were locked at the main console, of all things, and not just a regular key, though for the moment that was at the bottom of her pile of priorities.
At the top? Well. It probably should have been “powering the EBS” but as of something she clicked not too long ago there was a red light blinking toward the top right corner of the console’s screen that for the life of her she couldn’t quite figure out why or how to get it to stop.
Blue eyes flickered back to it for the umpteenth time since it started, her patience level for it quickly waning as she watched it go on for a few seconds.
“I can’t!” she screamed into the air. She fully intended to get back home sooner rather than later, given how often she was now able to come back. Which…seemed abnormal, but she wasn’t about to look what she considered a gift horse in the mouth. More often was better in her books, so she took advantage of that.
It was a given, especially when she piled on the fact that it helped with her symptoms, too.
But this was it for tonight. She was ready to call it, head home, and try to get some sleep. She could try and come back tomorrow to puzzle it out some more, but for now she was at her wit’s end. So she got up and turned to leave, stopping only when she spotted a similar blinking from beyond one of the doors that had opened just a tiny bit when she unlocked them earlier.
Tilting her head, she turned toward the door–it was a handle-less panel, actually, that slid into the wall–and slowly pushed it all the way open.
Blinking red lights lined the walls of this room, and they all had the same indicator at the bottom. A little lightning bolt, as it happened, and even without any knowledge of the alien language used to control this particular system she could put two and two together from there. Quickly she made her way through the room, looking for any obvious ways to try and charge the system. Or at least, it made sense to her that something like that would be included here, where apparently something was meant to take in and store power…
And sure enough, she found it. An unassuming little panel toward the back of the room that was marked in the same way her key and keycard were, as well as several hidden doors and passages only she had access to, only instead of one palm, as in the case of most of those doors, there were two. It looked…flimsy, if she were being honest, as if it wasn’t meant to be anything more than the backup of a backup to try and account for the worst of the worst possible scenarios.
But that was all she needed.
It came second nature to her now, what she was meant to do next. Positioning herself where she could put her palms where they were marked on the panel, she closed her eyes and focused, gathering up and channeling her energy through the panel. A quiet hum filled the room, the tone going higher and higher until it was abruptly cut short by a loud WHOOSH all around her, and then everything was quiet again.
Ekstrom opened her eyes, and to her delight every light was now blinking a bright green.Beaming, she hurried back out to the the room’s main console, hoping to see the red light there had turned green as well.
It was still red, but then…more than one door had opened earlier.
So she moved as quickly as she could, which to her surprise was faster than she thought she’d be able to. The more energy she spent, the better she felt, and after three more rooms she felt almost like she was completely back to normal. No headache, no nausea, no homesickness. Not even much static left, though she had no plans on abandoning her handy-dandy anti-static wristband until she was completely certain she wouldn’t zap another gadget to its death.
But even after fully charging the stores in the four rooms and another panel to charge the portion of the system that was here in the main room, the light had simply changed to a blinking yellow light.
“Oh, come on…” she muttered, her irritation with the whole thing once again surfacing. What more did she have to do? Suffer another lightning strike to try and gather more–
The lightbulb moment nearly blinded her with how obvious it was, though…she couldn’t help the doubts that quickly surfaced for the exact same reason. It was so stupidly obvious, would it actually work? Was that what she actually needed?
As if on cue, she heard a rumble overhead, and she took it as her cue.
She grabbed one of the old pucks she replaced and raced outside and to the surface, using her scanner to roughly find the spot closest to where she needed it to go. And it was a horribly rough estimation, but she plopped the sucker down as soon as she found a good enough spot and raced off, narrowly getting missed by a few bolts of lightning along the way. She was back in the control room soon enough, and now…she had to wait.
Though apparently not long. As if to take revenge on her for replacing the more easily accessible, purely metallic pucks, several bolts landed in quick succession. By the sounds of it she had a feeling she would have more repairs to do on the surface later down the line, but for now all she cared about was the blinking light on her screen.
The bright green light.
A window popped up and briefly cycled through some text before settling on a single line and two options, and though she couldn’t read it she could only imagine what it said.
𝚂𝚈𝚂𝚃𝙴𝙼 𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙳𝚈. 𝙴𝙽𝙶𝙰𝙶𝙴?
[ 𝚈𝙴𝚂 ] [ 𝙽𝙾 ]
[ 𝚈𝙴𝚂 ] [ 𝙽𝙾 ]
She clicked yes and held her breath when the screen immediately cleared, and her heart so very nearly sank into her stomach when it came back to life. It was almost like a replay of the simulation she found in her folder however many days ago it was. Power gathered from the five sources in the room, and she watched as the energy traveled, making its way to the first point in the net before spreading out. Red patches turned blue as the energy spread from one point to another, again playing “connect the dots” until it made a full circle.
Every patch had turned green, and at the bottom of the window was quite possibly the most satisfying thing she’d read in a long, long time.
Just two simple words that she again could only imagine what it said. Still, the mystery was comforting to some small degree. She let out the breath she'd been holding, the sound coming out as a sigh of relieve as she looked over the two words over and over again.
As far as she could tell, they could only mean one thing at this point.
𝚂𝚈𝚂𝚃𝙴𝙼 𝙾𝙽𝙻𝙸𝙽𝙴.
1501 (gdocs)
Backdated to 3/22/25.
Backdated to 3/22/25.
