Issue 1 Downtime

"Alright, let's see what else these wankers are hiding here while Plasticine tries to get them out." Sara says after stepping out of the door again and turns down the hall to keep checking rooms.

The other two rooms on the left side of the hallway were more holding cells. THESE ones were empty, though there were signs that it was not always so.

Cecil then checked the first door on the right side, the same way he did with the one on the left earlier.

An office! Full of papers, and a computer, and a table with chairs!

Cecil walked in and first looked at any papers that were lying out.

Plenty of papers--might be good to collect them. Vagaries about timetables and schedules, equipment manifests and purchase orders. Whoever worked here seemed to be somewhat in charge of procuring the necessary supplies for the base--though most of the actual details were written in some sort of code.

Cecil decided to leave the papers for now and made a quick search of the room for the keys.

No keys here, pilgrim.

Unless--yes! The keyboard! Of course!

...Or not!

"Finally. Let's see if there's anything useful on there." Sara says and makes her way to the computer, hoping it's still turned on and someone logged in.

Not so much logged in, unfortunately.

"Damnit." she mumbles and looks around to see if somebody was stupid enough to write down their username and password. It may be a black ops government facility put people are idiots everywhere, right?

Kevin checked the next door on the right, blade ready just in case of man-eating cubicles or office trolls.

Sara would not have luck finding the password written on a post-it note. She could guess at it, perhaps?

Kevin would find himself in--a kitchen? A rather large, fully stocked one, too, complete with industrial-sized ovens and tools. It looked like it could handle an entire restaurant's worth of orders, as well as having seats for people to eat and relax.

Well, that's out of place.

"Guess the worst case is we have to take the hard drives with us..." she says and tries a couple of passwords.

Code: Select all

blackair
savageland
mutantr&d
forqueenandcountry

Once Cecil had given up hope of finding the keys in the office he went to check what was behind door number three.

Sara had a lot to learn about being an 3l1t3 h4ck3r. None of those passwords worked.

Door number three held the server room! Rack after rack after rack of servers, whirring away at high speed.

There was a LOT of network traffic happening here.

"The hell?" Cecil didn't know a lot about computers, but you don't need that to know that to realize that this is a lot of computers, and that they had to be here for some purpose. "We so should have brought one of the techies."

Narrator wrote:Kevin would find himself in--a kitchen? A rather large, fully stocked one, too, complete with industrial-sized ovens and tools. It looked like it could handle an entire restaurant's worth of orders, as well as having seats for people to eat and relax.

Kevin whistled at the kitchen. "Evil sciencey people sure have nice kitchens."

"Wait... this is for way more than a skeleton crew..." he said as he stepped inside for a better look around.

It was a really nice kitchen!

A closer look around, however, may lead Kevin to believe all is not right with the world.

The spice jars, to name one. They were labeled in plain white labels calling them "Substance 22-J" or "Substance 43-A" and things of that nature. As opposed to, say, salt. And that was just the first cabinet!

"Well, no luck on the computer." Sara says, stepping out of the office. "Guess we'll have to take things apart and grab the ser...ver..." she trails off as she looks into the room next door. Flashing warning lights in the security room. No actual alarm. Bare bones staff. A fireworks show of network traffic. "Shut everything down! Yank the power cord if you have to! I think they might be remotely deleting files!"

Cecil looked surprised. He hadn't considered that, but immediately went doing what Sara suggested, pulling the power cords connected to the servers.

The lights flashed off as Cecil grabbed the various cords and whatnot. The server room powered down.

"Alright, we'll be taking all the hard drives we can carry, let John work his way through them." she says, stepping into the hallway again. "I guess we better check what's behind those thick doors..." she says with some hesitation, the base in the North Sea still weighing on her mind.

Like the control room, they were locked shut.

There was DEFINITELY something behind there, though.

"I'm half tempted to just pretend there are no doors here..." she mumbles to herself. But the chance that there are more prisoners behind those doors makes that urge moot. "Okay, there has to be a key around this place somewhere. Let's go take a look around upstairs." she says, heading up the stairs.

So, to sum up, Kevin was in the kitchen, Sara (and Cecil?) were headed upstairs, and Will and Steph were with the prisoners. Good plan!

If the bottom floor was all reception and business, the top floor was where the work got done. This floor looked more like a lab hallway, with charts and graphs and the like. Perhaps a bit ominous were the large amount of guns--or, at least, things that looked like guns--mounted in the ceiling, pointing not at the hallways, but at the doors to the various rooms along the hallway.

Along the right side, there was a single door close by the entrance, and a pair of double-doors a bit further down. The left just had the one pair of double-doors.

There was also a single door at the end of the hallway-this one super-thick and metal. The door must have been a foot thick, if not more.

In the not-kitchen, Kevin paused before the refrigerator.

"Yeah... so not opening that. Probably full of organs or sentient pastries that want to commit suicide by shoving themselves down my throat."

He checked the cabinets around a big metal sink instead.

"This place makes no sense..." Sara mumbles, carefully opening the first door on the right.

Kevin Gravis wrote:In the not-kitchen, Kevin paused before the refrigerator.

"Yeah... so not opening that. Probably full of organs or sentient pastries that want to commit suicide by shoving themselves down my throat."

He checked the cabinets around a big metal sink instead.

The cabinets were filled with various dishes and silverware, things like that.

...Odd shit, though. They weren't, like, bought at a supermarket or something. Some of the bowls looked ancient--thousand of years old. Others were bent in odd shapes or awkward angles. Some of the knives were WAY too sharp. Some of the plates had writing on them--slurs in English, and then other things in languages he couldn't recognize.

Odd shit.

Sara Stanton wrote:"This place makes no sense..." Sara mumbles, carefully opening the first door on the right.

The door was labled "imaging", and, in fact, contained a large MRI machine behind a thick, thick sheet of some glass-like material, accessible by a door.

In the machine was...something. Hard to identify from here, but it looked pretty dead, with blood and other bodily fluids having seeped out, pooled, and coagulated.

"Oh god..." she mumbles, walking over to the controls to see what the hell is stuck inside the machine.

"Hell's Kitchen, I suppose," he mused, "And a waste of time apparently."

So he went to go be helpful.

"Found a weird-ass kitchen... lab... thing... so... anyone need something diced?" he radioed.

Sara Stanton wrote:"Oh god..." she mumbles, walking over to the controls to see what the hell is stuck inside the machine.

Hard to tell, actually--some of the parts looked somewhat familiar, but almost if they had been spliced together, Frankenstein-style. No apparent stitching, though--this was some sort of...hybrid? Between a wolf and SOMETHING with some armored plating.

Not a very successful one, apparently.

"Found some kind of hybrid... thing upstairs in a MRI machine. It looks dead." she answers Kevin over the radio.

"On my way... Lot's of WTF with these people huh?" Kevin responded, heading Sara's way.

"No kidding." she answers as she waits for Kevin. Once he gets there they proceed to the second door on the right.

THIS room was labeled "biochemistry lab"!

Indeed, rows and rows of chemicals sat on shelves, with Petri dishes and other science things ready to go.

Most of the whatever they were experimenting on seemed to have been removed, though--at least, nothing was laying out and about.

Perhaps in the cold room, attached to this room via another door?

"So far so normal..." she muses, heading to the cold room.

"If the kitchen is a lab... maybe the lab is a kitchen?"

The two would quickly regret opening the door to the cold room.

Body parts. That's what the room contained. Body parts. Eyes in a jar, organs, some limbs. Not just human, although there were plenty of human choices here, but from all sorts of animals--including some of the prehistoric ones outside in the savage land. They had been carefully dissected, catalogued, and stored here.

In the middle of the room was a lump of clay, with bits portioned roughly where the proper limbs would go--tail, fangs, claws, all pressed into the clay. It looked rather halfhazard,though, as if they were interrupted before completing him/it/whatever. At least, it was stashed in here in a way unlike the meticulous organization of the other parts.