NOVEL NEXT 2.36 Generating Access
"What's that? I can't hear you!" Ricky shouted at the heavy door. He slung the duffel bag off his shoulder to rummage through it as he continued, "Give me a sec and I can probably break the lock!"
"NO! No more breaking things! Everything will just lock down harder!" Salazar shouted back. The decontamination chamber was built to withstand everything from gasses to explosions, but it couldn't hold Salazar's ire. "Just find the fuse panel or generator, there's something weird about the power levels here! Try the lowest basement level you can access!"
"Do not worry friends, I will watch over Salazar!" Tapper chirped through the door. "Oh! We could even pass the time by playing a game."
"...And please hurry!" Salazar whined. Hopefully, he didn't hear Phanya and Ricky chuckle as they left back down the stairs.
Two flights of stairs later and the pair reached the bottom of the complex, a maintenance level of bare concrete hallways and exposed piping that kept anxiety high with their knocking. The darkness felt heavier than ever, and Ricky's lone flashlight threw sharp shadows amid the utilitarian structures. They didn't have enough flashlights for everyone, and Phanya felt especially useless as she huddled near the weak beam.
Maybe she could still do something to help. Phanya held a supercharged sense of self ever since the system forced the Body Mastery class on her, and with concentration she could feel any part of her body with unnerving accuracy. Now she focused her attention inwards and started playing with her Elven Glamour, feeling out how the perk actually affected her body and redirecting all those energies to only impact her skin. Ricky gasped, and when Phanya opened her eyes she found the surrounding area lit by her own pale turquoise light. Her glow wasn't nearly as strong as a proper flashlight, but it spread in all directions and made her a walking beacon in the darkness.
"Eh-heh, just until we find more flashlights," Phanya offered lamely. "Did my face change any? I tried to keep everything else normal."
"If you mean 'Do I look like I can scoop your soul out through your eyes' then no, you're still normal," Ricky quipped back, and the two resumed walking until Ricky could no longer contain his mouth. "...I still can't believe that you're actually a freaking numan, Phan. You sure you aren't some sleeper agent, or something?"
Phanya groaned, and her light started to dim. "Please don't start that. It already feels like this whole damn thing happened because Fairbanks thinks I'm a spy. I'm just me, same as everyone in Fableton."
"Alright alright, bad joke, won't happen again. But you can see why, right? It's always a huge deal in the movies when a numan has to come down from their floating cities, and I still kinda remember the parade we tried to throw when Fairbanks got stationed here. Y'know, before we learned what a dick he is. Point is, having two highblood numans within walking distance of Skratsville is nuts! Hey, why is your light so dim now?"
"I'm just me," Phanya repeated in a whisper, and Ricky suddenly realized how deeply he had just stuck his foot in his mouth.
"Whoa, hey! I know you're you, it's just surprising. And it's awesome, just look at how your numan-ness is interacting with the system! Or maybe that's just because it says you're an elf. Man, I need to hit level 4 and see what happens."
Phanya scoffed. Ricky's rantings rolled off her like comfortable white noise, and despite the circumstances her light brightened with her mood. They encountered a heavy security door with a piece of paper taped to the front that said, 'The generator room is closed down to all personnel below security clearance level 4 until Poltergeist Experiment 32-D concludes. If you need any supplies from the closet, see Lamry or the front desk. – Management'
"'Poltergeist'?" Phanya read aloud. "What the heck is a poltergeist?"
"Query detected," the door said. Phanya and Ricky yelped, crashed into each other, and collapsed in a tangle of panic while the door continued talking unbidden. By the time they calmed down they had missed the beginning of the soft electronic explanation and caught, "— in modern times, a 'poltergeist' can refer to a Phase Shift Instability entity that has entered into a symbiotic relationship with an artificial structure or object. This is distinct from the animism found in mundane objects which have been contaminated by P.S.I. radiation, as poltergeists display far higher levels of aggression. Is there anything else I can do for you?"
"Uh, can you open the door?" Phanya asked, just to get the most obvious out of the way.
"Security level: numan. Access granted," the door responded, and it cracked open with a loud click and a rush of warm air.
Ricky made one of his sputtering noises that combined amazement and annoyance, before a wicked grin split his face. "Man, Salazar is going to be SO pissed when he finds out you can just do that."
"Salazar isn't going to find out because a numan casually walking around here is nuts, remember?" Phanya growled back.
"Yeah yeah. Oh hey uh, door computer, can you open the decontamination doors from here?" Ricky asked. Nothing happened. "Almost forgot what it's like to work with a normal computer," Ricky sighed, and elbowed Phanya until she repeated the question.
"My apologies, but safety regulations require a full decontamination sequence to and from designated clean rooms, which can only be superseded by emergency override." Ricky sighed again and made Phanya rephrase the question to ask if they could open the other security doors from here. "My apologies, but this terminal does not have remote access to other security checkpoints."
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"Figured as much," Phanya shrugged. "Um, thank you, door computer."
"You are welcome. Is there anything else I can do for you?"
Ricky snapped to attention and started jostling Phanya. "Oh! Ask it about Poltergeist Experiment 32-D!" She did, if only to make him stop.
"Accessing employee personal logs with keyword match," the door chimed. Phanya started to ask questions about the ethics of her security clearance, but Ricky shushed her when the door started to speak with the recording of a gruff male voice.
"Got chewed out by the accounting department again. Not my fault these damn spooks prefer ancient-ass systems, I need specialized tools to work on them! But I managed to integrate 'Poltergeist Experiment 32-D' into our heating system, and did anyone thank Lamry? Noooo, he's just maintenance, he doesn't have a PhD! I oughtta turn the hot water off on those whitecoats, but then I'd have to clean up the feedback mess…" The recording devolved into a reading of grievances against everyone who wasn't Lamry, and Phanya eventually asked the door to shut it off.
They stepped through into the generator room. It was much larger than the preceding hallways, with storage shelves and forgotten furniture lining the length, but the room still felt cramped by the mess of piping. They snaked over every surface, every shelf and desk and across the floor before they disappeared into the walls and ceiling in every direction. Ricky sensed that the chaotic tangle was not the doing of a proud technician like Lamry, but all pipes branched off from one squat metal cylinder by the far wall that looked like a tree grown completely out of control. An evil tree, thanks to the fire glowing under the boiler and its stifling heat.
Phanya held up one hand to shield her face from the heat. "So, uh. What do we do now?"
"I think I see the fuse panel behind the boiler," Ricky said. "Just gotta flip them and get out, no problem at all. Yep, totally simple."
He started to tiptoe towards the boiler, taking care not to trip over any of the pipes at ground level, but Phanya held back. There was something wrong about the room, beyond the obvious weirdness. Something that stayed just on the edge of her perception no matter where Phanya looked, hiding in the shadows and moving under cover of the noisy pipes. The knocking from expanding and contracting metal had grown especially distracting since they entered the generator room, and if she struggled to focus Phanya could almost trace a line of noise up the wall and across the ceiling.
"Ricky! Shields up now!" Phanya shouted. She wasn't consciously aware of the exact threat, but her instincts screamed for Ricky's safety and Phanya shoved her words through her Commander's tactical function. It worked on Tapper because he wanted it; hopefully it would work on Ricky because he needed it.
Ricky obeyed the order without question, so the thick metal pipe that slammed down from the ceiling met his shield instead of his skull. It struck with enough force for the piping to warp and bend over the shield, but Ricky's hauler suit kept his arm steady and he grimaced under the impact. Phanya closed the distance in one bound to help, but the instant she touched the aggressive piping she yanked her hands away with a pained hiss. The metal was hot as a stove top, hot enough for the split-second contact to cause a point of damage to her HP, and Phanya chastised herself for not noticing the torrent of steam billowing out of the pipe's broken end. Thankfully she had her own metal Knucklebuster gloves, and one well-placed punch shunted the pipe enough for Ricky to shove the rest aside.
"Thanks," Ricky panted, shaking the impact shock out of his shield arm. "Don't suppose you just so happened to see that pipe fall because it's old?"
"Nope, something definitely targeted you," Phanya flatly responded as she kept scanning the room.
"'Course it did," Ricky grumbled. The two stood back-to-back on the lookout for the next attack, with Ricky watching the floor and Phanya watching the ceiling.
"There, the corner!" Phanya shouted, and Ricky spun around to follow her finger.
In the furthest corner of the generator room something shifted in the darkness, too obscured to see any detail until a chunk of the darkness itself split off. A bolt of pitch black nothing launched at the pair, screaming through the air so fast that Phanya's enhanced reflexes barely had time to dodge out of the way. Ricky didn't have the time to even bother trying to dodge and just twitched his shield upwards, reeling back a step when the bolt struck home. Phanya only spared a glance to ensure the other wasn't hurt before she bounded off after the attacker, so both of them missed the boiler's second attack.
Steam whistled and metal screamed as another pipe tore itself free and slammed into Ricky's back in a sideways sweep. Without his guard up the pipe wrapped around Ricky's torso and constricted, the possessed metal grinding against his magic armor as it tried to squeeze the life out of him. He could feel the heat through his breastplate and Ricky struggled against his instincts to grab at the scalding metal with his bare hands, instead chopping at it with his shield to limited success.
Slight movement caught his eye, and Ricky strained to make out a valve release lever further down the same pipe constricting him. A long red adjustable wrench stood clamped to the lever, and from its handle a pendulum of ancient human bone swung with the motion. Ricky cringed slightly at the skeletal hand, but the immediate threat to his life won out and Ricky slowly stomped one hydraulic foot in front of the other until he reached the monkey wrench. The instant he managed to get both hands on the wrench and pull the valve released, screaming steam with enough force to buck against Ricky's grip and enough heat to knock off a few points of HP. Just as quickly once the whistle stopped, so did the pipe's squeezing and Ricky shrugged it off like so much tinfoil.
In the brief respite Ricky checked on his postmortem lifeline. The pipe that attacked him had torn itself off the wall, revealing a hidden utility closet behind with the rest of the skeleton wearing a dark jumpsuit and surrounded by tools. The small room practically begged for Ricky to shelter inside for just a minute, just to get his head on straight, but he heard Phanya fighting against something in the background while more pipes started to rattle in their brackets. He did spare a second to duck into the utility closet for a pair of heavy leather gloves sitting on the workbench, even though that meant leaning uncomfortably close to the skeleton. Ricky couldn't help himself and glanced downwards, gently brushing aside the layer of dust on the jumpsuit's name tag.
"Thanks, Lamry," Ricky whispered to the maintenance worker, and slipped the gloves on. Next, he broke off the monkey wrench and flipped it over in his hand: a full meter of hardened alloys from tip to teeth, and hefty enough that he'd need to use both hands if it weren't for his hauler suit. The system identified it as a tool and not a weapon, so his Armaments class didn't provide any bonuses, but it was still well-balanced and felt right in his hand.
Another pipe broke free and whipped around the room as a loose fire hose of boiling steam, and Ricky got to work.