Clusterfrag

Axel stares at the feed as the scene comes into view. His blood runs cold.

So not on a super fun vacation.

He feels revulsion, and an anger without a target. "up... around..." Burbles through the haze as if from a distant broadcast. He glances up to see mouse motioning. He stares blankly for five seconds before understanding clicks, and he programs the tiny drone to climb the wall above the uncovered mass grave. His eyes flick back to the feed, disgust and terror building.

There's a pop, and then he could almost swear that he can smell the video feed. He glances up, more to remind himself that he's not in VR than out of any concern of situational awareness. The feed gets bigger. No. It's another second before he understands what he's staring at: The same as the feed, but in full, glorious metahuman eye resolution, and very very close. His heart, which has been running in "speed metal" mode, switches over to "rodent on an electric fence" mode. His vision almost seems to go white, as an electric shock winds its way around his skull, down his spine, and takes up residence in his gut.

"No... No. Nonononono!" Escapes his throat, and he tries to stand as his arms and legs refuse to cooperate. The signals from his brain tell his body to run, but what comes out is more of a slide and shuffle, and he kicks his feet against the ground, propelling himself backward on his ass and elbows. "FUCK THIS! FUCK THAT! FUCK THE GODDAMN GHOSTS ON THIS SHIP! FUCK TEX! FUCK PREACHER! FUCK THIS BOAT! FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING, GODDAMMIT!" He nearly screams as he scrambles and crawls ineffectually toward the stairs.

Achak, still gagging, hurries after Axel. He reaches out a steadying hand but then stops, thinking better of it. Instead, his fingers float to his temples and his eyelids flutter. A guttural but melodic sound resonates from deep within his vocal chords. It's not clear whether it's a song or a chant.

Axel-- still scrambling on all fours-- feels a deeply rooted calm spreading in his bosom, like three fingers of good scotch. Despite the cold metal underneath his palms and knees, he can swear he feels the warmth of a fire. Even though the grisly odor still clings to the back of his sinuses, he is able to draw a deep (but shuddering) breath. Managing a glance over his shoulder, Axel instantly realizes that Achak is doing something-- channeling his emotions, somehow.

Reiya is incredibly grateful that Achak was ready to help Axel when she wasn't. But she also feels a sting of shame; she's the mage on the rigger's team, not Achak. Yet between the rocking of the boat, the dead bodies, and that sweet cloying smell she keeps detecting, it's all she can do to keep her nausea at bay. Given their increasingly grim findings, though, the shaman knows she's going to have to do something to make herself capable of actually taking action.

Reiya picks up that sweet smell again, and it's so incongruous with the smell of death and decay that she immediately suspects a magical source. Ignoring the anguish of her stomach, she takes a look.

(( Assensing ))

Yung is somewhere far off in his head when the pungent smell assails him. His eyes wash over the room, reflexively losing focus as they scan the scene. He wrinkles his nose in an attempt to block out the smell, but it seems to saturate his sinuses through other orifaces. He closes his eyes but the grotesquery remains, a grayscale lithograph stuck to the backs of his eyelids. A creeping sense of nostalgia washes over him, some scene from a trid he saw when he was too young that gave him nightmares for years.

Beyond Horizon.

All of these mental gymnastics flip through his head in a matter of moments, yet on the outside only a stoic visage is present. As Axel panics he stands motionless, somewhere in his brain his amygdala is operating at maximum capacity, nothing to fight, no reason to run, freeze. And so he remains a popsicle, slowly melting to turn his head and watch Axel scramble away.

I should help.

Unfortunately his body fails to cooperate. He lets out the breath he was subconsciously holding as he watches Achak weaves his magic. Slowly he begins to regain control.

"Hey omae," He says flatly but with an undertone that radiates warmth. "Whatever did...long gone, couldn’t get to them; so it didn't stick around." He runs his fingers over the mechanical lock. "Seems in their haste they were short sighted with security." He lies, nodding his head while trying to trick himself into believing the fabrication himself.

"Best thing we can do right now is not dwell on the how, but figure out the what and the why so we can get back on our boat and get home, eh?"

Head swimming, Mouse instinctively reaches out to place a steady palm between Mick’s shoulder blades, unsure whether it’s to ground them, or a selfish impulse to steady herself. She’s distantly aware of Axel’s panic, of Achak doing… something magical, of Yung’s smooth words, laced with druglike sweetness, trying to reassure him that things are okay when they are absolutely fucking not.

Her free hand clenches into a tight fist, small and impotent, as if to squeeze imaginary shards of broken glass into dust. "AXEL'S NOT WRONG, THOUGH." Her eyes scrunch shut, loosing tears that had welled up from the acrid scent of the meat. "WHAT IS IT ABOUT PREACHER, THAT EVERY ONE OF HIS JOBS LEAVES US STRANDED IN THE DARK IN A GODDAMN SLAUGHTERHOUSE?" She practically spits these words into her synths, each sharpened and dripping with vaimed at their dear customer, Achak for being his ‘friend’, her own stupid self for expecting any better. "WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH US- THAT WE KEEP FALLING FOR IT?" She's trembling again, her jagged breaths transferring through in tremors to the hand bracing herself via Mick.

She forces her eyes open, forces herself to stare ahead at the sea of metahuman flesh piled into the navigation room. As if egged on by Yung’s words, she unballs her fist, leaving angry pink crescents pressed into her palm, and reaches into a pocket of her coat, only to withdraw a wadded up facemask, soaked through from the storm. "YOU BRING UP A GOOD POINT, WE COULD JUST ‘GET BACK ON OUR BOAT AND GET HOME’ RIGHT FRAGGING NOW. SO WHY DON’T WE?" It’s only now that she twists her head back to face the rest of the group, struggling to parse each of their expressions for an answer. "DO YOU REALLY WANT YOUR PAYDATA THAT BAD? THAT YOU WON’T LEAVE WITHOUT IT?"

One pointed ear at a time, she pulls the dampened mask tight over her face, still trembling as she suits up for the grim task ahead. "IF THAT’S THE CASE- I WON’T HOLD YOU UP." Once again she draws her feeble light, allowing it to wash out the bodies before them in a shaking splash of crimson, and takes one careful step, then another, into the open-air tomb.

(( Perception for a black box, or anything independently powered that can be connected to? (Barring that, an obvious port in case we do get the power back?) Also, if the agent hasn’t already resumed looking for icons, it should probably get back on that. ))

The grim, drab interior of the freighter fades into a mosaic of dead gray shapes as Reiya perceives astrally. The numerous corpses-- now devoid of life essence-- thankfully lose their distinct shapes and become part of the landscape. It's easier to focus, not having a constant reminder of the loss of life that occurred here. She kneels to get a better look at the astral flotsam that seems to be spread throughout the ship.

Small tendrils of iridescent light writhe in impossible geometry. A trained assenser can deduce a great many details from the minutiae of this residual magic; the color, the pattern, and the vibrations all have a story to tell. And Reiya has been trained well. She recognizes this magic, or at least the root of it. Her mentor called it iksi’s. Simply put, it's the astral equivalent of a chameleon's skin. Or, maybe, a pair of eyes closed in a dark room. It's all very abstract. Nonetheless, Reiya is certain that the omnipresent astral signature painted across the ship is evidence of masking magic. Someone expended quite a lot of energy to hide someone, something, or themselves. She guesses from the degraded state of the signature that the spell or spells were cast some time ago. At least it poses no immediate threat to the team.

As Reiya plays mage detective, Mouse is busy playing twister with the sea of bodies. About one meter into the room and her foot catches on one of the corpses. She flails for purchase but, finding none, falls sideways into a pile of the dead. The putrid miasma forces itself into her olfactory system anew and she gags. It takes a few frenzied attempts to free herself before she manages to stand again. The search continues with Mouse exercising extreme caution in her footstep placement.

The terminals are all dead. No surprise there. Sans power the navigation consoles are simply empty screens and lonely holo projectors. Very few of the controls are hardware, and those are all totally inscrutable to the decker. She relegates herself instead to looking for access panels and storage bays.

After five minutes of prodding and peering (and more than a few profanities) Mouse locates a data-store cassette lodged in a chassis underneath one of the consoles. Although she's not familiar with Naval technology, it bears all the hallmarks of a black box.

Cold, wet fabric clings to the decker's small frame, dragging her every footstep with its constant chill and omnipresent weight. For one fleeting instant, it’s joined by the touch of cold flesh, a stranger’s frigid cheek pressed against her own in intimate macabre. Even when Mouse scrambles to her feet and retrieves the black box, the sense memory lingers in her awareness. It’s all too easy to imagine her limp corpse strewn amongst the rest, just another piece of the metahuman wreckage.

"...so that’s it, then. That’s all that’s left." She turns the cassette over in her fingers, unclear whether she’s addressing the paltry find or the lives reduced to a rotting pile of anonymous components. She forces herself to draw in another shuddering breath, the filtering capabilities of her mask hardly a match for the pervasive stench of decay. As she exhales, her voice escapes once more, whisper soft. "If that’s all there is… then let’s keep dancing."

It’s a song- at least a century old, rendered thin and reedy, devoid of accompaniment. She takes a trembling step into the limited space between tangled limbs, landing on the ball of one foot, balancing only a moment before taking another hop forward.

"We’ll break out the booze and have a ball~"

More than a song, it’s a strategy. It’s a means to force herself to keep her breath deep and steady, even when she wants nothing less. It forces the sound of her own voice to rattle through her head, the alien sound crowding out intrusive thoughts. As it turns out, blocking out the world, shoving down fear, and scavenging from scenes of grotesque tragedy are all just regular life skills: hard to forget when one's had practice. It’s just like riding a bike- or it would be, if Mouse had ridden a bike before.

"If that’s all- there- is-"

By the time the decker regroups with her team, she’s quiet once more, her gaze distant even in her victory. "...CAN WE GO NOW?" Her tones are softer, smaller, even as she fiddles with the recovered device, tracing the edges for a port.

(( She’ll plug in if she can, just to keep things moving, but she’ll probably just try to walk and crack in AR (if she can) rather than just ragdoll here. ))

The cassette loader is unpowered, which presents a problem. Mouse solves it by plugging her deck into the hardware port on the back. Since she's using a diagnostic port it's a band-aid fix at best, but the decker figures it will suffice for her needs. She spends a few moments poking around the unfamiliar interface until she retrieves a data dump from the black box.

Unfortunately, the data is raw. To Mouse, it appears to be complete gibberish. It would take someone knowledgeable in vehicle data to make any sense of.

Axel returns to the team, slightly embarrassed, and paradoxically calm.

"I'm okay," he says haltingly. "Actually, I'm totally not, but we can keep going, so that'll have to do for now." He cranes his neck over to peer at the cassette that Mouse is holding like an urn, the final evidence of something important distilled down to a simple container.

"Let me take a look?" He both says and asks at the same time.

Mick horks and heaves, disgorging the contents of their gut down the wall. It's very Pollock.

"Jesus," they stammer out as they stand, hand against the wall, the spot on their back where Mouse's hand had been still warm, still grounding. "Must'a tossed some bad salad..." The joke is all the ork can offer, the wave of nausea still battering against their rocky shores, subsiding slowly, like the semi-annual storm surge they remember learning about as a kid that continually erases more and more of what had once been New Orleans– before humanity and its hubris ruined the planet.

The adept attempts to regain their composure, standing at full and swaying on their feet as they release their hand from the wall. Mick struggles to remember the last thing they ate– even as they watch it slide in pulpy gobs down the wall and pool at the intersection with the floor.

It's the glimmer of the blossoming crush they have on Mouse that they've been quietly ignoring for days that offers the distraction they need to pull themself from the throes of throwing up– that small hand print still faintly aglow between their shoulder blades. Closing their eyes, they take a few steadying breaths. In for six. Out for six. In for six. Hold for Satan. The ork's lips purse as they let the breath out in a slow, steady, soft jet, their eyes closed as they feel the equilibrium spread through their bones and connective tissues and muscles, rippling their skin in waves of gooseflesh that tingle electric in the frigid air of the death chamber.

With no better idea as to where to direct their attention, Mick approaches and kneels by the closest body, batting a flash of their parents' disjoined forms piled in the bathtub from their mind, and searches for some kind of identifying information in the corpse's pockets.

The sympathetic precision of Axel's assessment draws a weak smile from the decker, which lingers as she hands over the black box. "IF IT’S ANY REASSURANCE, I CAN CONFIRM THAT IT'S JUST RAW DATA- NO SURPRISE CLOWN SNUFF THIS TIME."

The unnerving scene begins to settle into an even stranger reality.

What are we doing here, fraggin Preacher.

Yung scans the room, looking for something out of place, other than the piles of corpses littered throughout. He examines some of the bodies, trying to determine the cause of death. He searches for used shell casings or signs of gunfire, anything that would provide some kind of indication of the final moments of these tortured souls.

The fuck happened here?

(( Just for clarification, were they all stacked up on the other side of the door, really as though they were all trying to claw their way out? ))

To most people the black box data would appear to be a random collection alphanumeric characters and strange algorithms. But, to Axel, it's poetry. Reading the diagnostic data is what he imagines reading music must be like-- from the incomprehensible springs an orchestra of power, fuel economy and direction. It only takes a minute or so for the rigger to gather a picture in his head.

The freighter left a port in Vladivostok, sailed across the Pacific, made a jag, and ended up in its present location. Several anomalies in this 'story' pique Axel's curiosity.

First, the freighter stopped randomly some thirty kilometers off of the Soviet coast for twelve hours. It might be nothing, but the data suggests that there were no mechanical problems at the time.

Second, the ship's payload registered a lot less when the power was cut than when she set sail. The ship lost a considerable amount of weight, though Axel can't find where.

Third-- and this is the doozy-- the electrical supply readings are all over the place. Most of the power is going to the engines, which is normal; however, the secondary load (which is almost half of the ship's power) is being routed somewhere below decks. Axel is stuck here, for the below deck electrical terminals have all been obfuscated.

Mick, meanwhile, has completed a search of a body picked at random. They gingerly withdraw a stained name placard, which had previously taken residence on the owner's breast. The writing is in Cyrillic. Mick glances down at the disheveled uniform, which has a single stripe on each shoulder. The dead man's face is fixed in a rictus of agony and his skin is soft and sallow.

Mick carefully eases the body on its side, mindful not to set hand nor foot in a congealed puddle of mysterious origin. The body is in the early stages of decomposition, as one would expect. Mick sits back on their haunches and studies the corpse. A sailor? They recall old flatvids that corroborate as much, though in those a giant Kaiju would rise out of the ocean and gobble them up.

Yung approaches the corpse that Mick is peering at. Now that it's on its side, Yung has a clear view of a majority of the body. While he's not totally sure what to look for, there are no obvious signs of injury. Examining the room he finds no sign of a struggle nor a firefight. The dead man's clothes are stained, but not with blood.

Mick glances up at Yung and, aiming to cut the tension, suggests, "See, this is what happens when one of the Russian sailors suggests boofing the potato vodka."

Every muscle in the decker’s fragile body is taut, like a rubber-band stretched to its limits, ready to snap. Mouse is ready to bolt, to address the internal screeching of her ancient prey-animal ancestors to leave the scene of mass death, but the team lingers. Instead, she’s left anxiously shifting her weight from foot to foot, like a kid desperate to pee, as she eyes her teammates who’ve composed themselves enough to examine the scene. "SO WE’RE DOING THIS…"

Defying her every instinct, she forces herself back to the scene of the massacre, crouching down beside Mick. As the ork maneuvers the cadaver with apparent ease, Mouse is left with the revelation that she is completely, utterly out of her depth.

Following her first job with the team, she’d made a preliminary attempt at learning first-aid, having decided that she would rather keep her crew alive if given any say in the matter. However, she’s still stuck somewhere around lesson 101: “Blood is supposed to stay in the body, and efforts should be made to keep it there.” Any forensic analysis outside of an anxious laundry list of ‘ways one could theoretically die’ is probably outside of her scope.

She blinks back tears to squint at the broken frames before her, glancing between the room and the imagery distilled through Boo’s black and white feed. She may not be a doctor, but she knows pattern recognition, analysis, decoding. Each one of these people has been warped through some horrific function, metaphorically salted, and output in the grotesque scene before them: a hash of human remains.

Sitting on the backs of her heels, she rests her hands on her knees, struggling to imagine herself as some disheveled, insomniac detective. "OKAY… SO WHAT DO THESE PEOPLE ALL HAVE IN COMMON? "

<<They’re dead.>> The familiar, grating voice chimes in ‘helpfully’, having apparently found a way to restore his communication privileges.

"- BESIDES THE OBVIOUS."

(( Is there a way to gauge similarities between the bodies without a full on forensic analysis? Something she can point out to someone who DOES know about medicine or fighting? (Not sure First Aid would help, but she does have a few dice to throw in there too.)

Also, she'll probably swap out her unused Armor program for the R3 Russian Linguasoft. (It's in the email version of the sheet, not on the older site PDF). ))

Mick focuses on Mouse, the team's primary keeper of the flight-or-flight,-but-faster energy, and tries to convey a quiet confidence they're not sure they really feel. "Hey, we got this. Not that we would, but between the five of us, we could probably have done all this too." The ork gestures to the pile. "When I was still a kid, my buddy Tomás and me were breaking into houses in Denny-Blaine, and I was losing my shit. Just melting the frag down, you know? Like Hamaoka in '48, but with more snot and tears. And you know what Tomás said to me?" The ork spins on the balls of their feet, their boots making a sickly squeak in the gooey post-mortem miasma, and places their hands on the decker's shoulders. "We're the scary things now. We are what goes bump in the night." Their eye contact is direct, conspiratorial, intimate. "We are what haunts the darkness here."

There's a tingling sensation as the linguasoft slots, followed by what can only be described as an expanding. Mouse decides this must be a bit what drugs feel like, minus the euphoria. Her eyes flick down to the nameplate still clutched in Mick's deadly mitts. The previously inscrutable squiggly marks haven't changed, but they now seem familiar-- as if she'd just suddenly remembered what they were. Her synthetic voice echoes down the corridor as she reads aloud: "ENSIGN ALEKSANDR PETUKHOV, FIRST CLASS."

Her gaze meanders further down to the remains of Aleksandr. Stenciled on the back of his uniform is VOSKHOD LIGHT INDUSTRY, also in Cyrillic.

Now she’s done it. She’s gone and dragged the rest of the team from the task at hand, back into her neuroses. The decker’s dark eyes bob upward from the nametag, a convenient (and blatant) distraction from the morbid scene and its lurking danger, to meet Mick’s more steady, confident gaze. She doesn’t want to.

Mouse’s attention bounces away almost immediately as she lets out a breath of laughter, struggling to imagine the badass before her as a snotty, shivering mess like herself. "DUNNO IF YOU’VE NOTICED, BUT I DON’T HAVE MUCH OF A WAR FACE." Another deflection.

Mentally, she might as well be right back on that gunboat, curled over the rail as they speed away from Alcatraz, whining like a spoiled child about why everything has to be so damn hard. She’s only baited back to face her companion by that glimmer of green, steady and determined. "THIS IS DIFFERENT." She finally manages. "THIS IS MORE LIKE…" Her brow furrows, trying to put words to the all too familiar sensation. "...HAVE YOU EVER FELT LIKE THERE WAS SOMETHING HUNTING YOU?" The instant the words hit the air, she feels stupid. How dumb would someone have to be to go after Mick?

She shakes her head hard, as though physically trying to cast off the thought. "POINT IS, WHATEVER DID THIS- I DON’T THINK IT CARES IF WE’RE A THREAT." From the grainy drone feed, it was clear it made no distinction between soldier and civilian, to say the least. "EITHER IT’S INDIFFERENT, OR IT’S ACTIVELY MALICIOUS. I DON’T KNOW WHICH IS WORSE. "

It's only now that she seems to register Mick's grip bracing her. She reaches a cautious hand upward, uncertain, before opting to simply rest her fingertips against one of their wrists in simple, but appreciative acknowledgement. "JUST MEANS WE GOTTA KEEP PUSHING FORWARD, YEAH? THE MORE TIME WE SPEND FUCKING AROUND, THE MORE LIKELY WE FIND OUT THE HARD WAY."

"That's the point, Cinnamon Roll," the ork says, standing defiantly and stretching a hand down to their petrified friend. "On this wreck, we are the fuckin' hard way." Mick looks to the rest of the team. "I say we head below deck, try to turn the power back on, see what down there might need killing."

There are no obvious wounds among the dead, with the exception of some minor scrapes where they might have fallen. The team can find no tell-tale signs of trauma. They just look... dead. In addition, Yung notices one of the corpses has a light pistol still in his holster. If the cause was a threat that could be perceived, it seemed they failed to.

Achak studies Aleksandr's body for a few minutes. "I am only trained in combat first aid. His skin looks strange, but I couldn't say why."

When Mick suggests they press on, Achak nods.

Though hugely sympathetic to Mick's suffering, it's all Reiya can do to keep herself from heaving. Irritated at her seemingly perpetual nausea, she holds her nose, takes a breath, and lets it out a few times. "Sure, let's get this over with," the shaman agrees to Mick's suggestion. "But you should know that this whole place reeks of masking magic. Iksi's," she adds with a significant look at Achak. "It's not recent, but it's a drekton of magic cast with considerable skill."

Reiya inadvertently catches a whiff of the decomposing corpses and steels herself again. That does it. "I'm no fucking use if all I can do is struggle with nausea. So I'm going to change into a crow, which should allow me to scout ahead, too." And smell almost nothing, she thinks something like anticipation. "But I obviously won't be able to speak or use my comm. I have a spell that allows communication mind to mind. I'll cast that on one of more of you if I have anything to pass on. I'll keep it to those of us with astral capabilities unless it's urgent, but fair warning." She smiles faintly at Mouse.

Reiya's quite glad she left Mach behind at Tex's ranch, given what they're in the middle of, but would appreciate having a model. It's been a long time since she's changed into anything other than a wolf. But that's one of the reasons she chose the crow: she can picture Mach in her mind's eye and craft herself into a slightly smaller, slightly nimbler, and far more intelligent version of the corvid than her beloved pet. Drawing on magic already helps to quell her queasiness, and she shimmers with relief into crow form.

(( Cast Shapechange at Force 4: Crow ))

Mick takes Mouse's hand and pulls her to her feet quickly, but gently. The adept makes eye contact with the members of the team, all floating in the darkness like untethered ghosts, their features sallow in the greasy air of the death chamber, and nods in affirmation of their impending descent into the bowels of the beast.

"‘THE HARD WAY’, THEN? IS THAT OUR NEW TEAM NAME?" Of course, she’s biased. The dirty jokes practically write themselves.

From the sheer speed with which Mouse takes the assist back up, she clearly can’t wait to get out of dodge, scuffling along behind her crewmates. Feet moving autonomously toward the prior junction, her attention lingers in her HUD, ignoring where she’s going in favor of still images she had snagged from the scene, and has started to annotate with her observations.

"SO TO RECAP, WE STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT KILLED THEM. JUST THAT IT DIDN’T KILL EVERYONE AT ONCE." One last time, she tries to visualize the flow of movement in the room, marking the corpse-cluttered bottleneck where those who registered the danger had attempted to claw their way to safety. "EITHER THERE WAS NOTHING TO SHOOT, OR IT COULD HAVE GOTTEN THE DROP ON THEM: STARTED BY ELIMINATING ANYONE WHO COULD FIGHT BACK." Of course, Reiya’s observation only added weight to the threat of a malevolent intelligence. "AND SOME KIND OF MAGIC WAS INVOLVED, BUT THE USER WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY TO HIDE IT."

Thankfully, rather than linger on grim hypotheticals, she’s interrupted by the Pavlov-conditioned rumpling of fabric and supplies, which she remembers keenly from Reiya’s first transformation. She allows herself a moment to properly gawk at yet another display of cool magic drek, before ‘helpfully’ moving to gather the stray clothing and supplies that couldn’t change with her. This sudden kind impulse, Mouse tells herself, has nothing to do with her knowledge that should she live long enough to return the gear, she might get to see boobs.

…in times like this, it’s important to keep up hope.

Axel chuckles. "The Hard Way: We stand erect, firm against any beating."

His expression sobers. "Weird shit on that black box. Got a serious mass loss somewhere along this tub's course. No telling how quickly it happened or when, but it doesn't seem to match up with the fuel burn rate." He checks the magazine in his Alta, and reviews the safeties of the drones. "Kinda thought it looked like it was riding high in the water. And if there are more bodies like this, it probably ain't crew or passengers getting off. Honestly, with the way things are going, It'd almost be more reassuring if the mass was because the crew straight up disappeared. Now we have at least two mysteries."

Achak glances out of a nearby window at the storm-torn deck below. "I noticed that there were no stairs down within the main structure. Curious design, isn't it? But that--" He points at large recessed area near the prow on the foredeck. "That looks like a cargo elevator. Should we descend from there?"

Mick grins as they head for the cargo lift, "Express elevator to hell, going down."

Reiya's form collapses into a dark ruffle of feathers, which promptly takes flight and glides out of the room. The other runners follow, backtracking to the first level. The hurricane greets them as they emerge from the safety of the interior, pelting faces with rain and drenching clothes. It's a perilous track up the foredeck, where uneasy footing has to be hard won on the slick surface.

The entrance to the cargo hold is a large, slightly recessed square about ten meters by ten. A number of flattened ramps flank the elevator, their bindings flapping in the violent gale. At the far end, in between the platform and the fore tower is a small terminal with a number of levers. The terminal is dark, and presumably unpowered.

Achak shields his face from the storm's fury and kneels at the edge of the elevator. The drop from deck to platform is only about a meter, but the space underneath is protected by structural beams. He looks backwards at the team, raising his voice against the clamor. "There must be a way to activate the elevator manually."

Mick cocks an eyebrow and scans the area for a control box or console, searching for any kind of visible conduit that could channel a grouping of tied cables, needles of water droplets stinging their face and forcing their eyes to a defensive squint.

As Mick turns to survey the immediate area, an errant tarp detaches from some of the nearby loading equipment. The hurricane winds fling the plastic sheet directly into Mick's face. It wraps around their head, smearing filth across their face. While in no way enough of a threat to injure the adept, the piss-poor luck strikes a nerve in their heart.

Mick is far too busy summoning a blue streak of creative profanities to focus on their search and as a result, doesn't find anything of interest.

Axel runs his hand down his face, squeegeeing the water down onto his hand, and then shakes his hand to the side, discarding the water in a spray that disappears into the wind. He squints at the scene, trying to make sense of the design logic.

Idly, he sends a command to Wind and Whirlwind, both canted over almost 45 degrees to hold position against the wind, to tag anything matching junction boxes or control panels in the area.

The ork flails, batting the plastic sheeting off their face in a harried, graceless explosion of limbs before turning their considerable ire on anything and everything inanimate nearby. Mick's fists rain down upon a guard railing, then a firehose spool, and finally a poster that– without reading even a lick of Cyrillic– is clearly a post espousing the importance of Safety First!

"GODDAMNED-CHICKEN-FUCKING-HOOP-LUBING SHIT! BADGER-CUNT-COLOSTOMY-FUCKWAFFLING FART!! LABIA-LASER-CUM-SQUELCHING-EGGROLL-RIMMING FUUUUCCCCKKKKK!!!"

Even Mouse manages to break from her preoccupation with the stifling darkness, immediate need for a power source, and more pleasant thoughts of boobs to let out an audible snerk at the screaming, flailing tarp. "NE, WE FOUND OUR SPIRIT."

Mick scowls at Mouse's rib, delivering one final, rattling blow to the mangled wall where the laminated poster had been affixed only seconds prior.

"PUSSY SPACKLE."

Axel circles the unpowered terminal, performing a systematic examination. Without power an elevator is just a floor, but that would generate major inconvenience if the power plant is below decks as well. He can't read Cyrillic, but he does possess an affinity for all things mechanical. If only there was an...

"Override!" Axel exclaims as he discovers a corroded panel on the backside of the terminal. A swift slam with his fist dislodges the panel, revealing a large safety switch. The switch is covered by a protective plastic mold, suggesting that it's never been used before.

Axel pumps a fist in the air, and takes advantage of a flash of lightning to throw the lever down and proclaim, "It's alive!"

He walks back to the team with a grin before he's even verified if the lever worked. "Scavenger's secret: always check the back panels. That's where they keep the good shit."