Rebecca sat heavily in front of a computer terminal, her head throbbing and the pale skin of one arm itching
terribly beneath her sleeve. The brightness of the screen was almost painful, making the words appear blurry and hard to read. She tried to blink away the discomfort, but that course of action only brought a wave of sharp, stomach-churning nausea with it, nothing like the relief she sought.
Beside her, Holmes was murmuring about the possible implications of the data they were finding, but the utter
pounding inside her poor, aching skull made it nearly impossible to concentrate on just what he was on about. It was all Rebecca could do to remain focused on the task at hand and
not slump over in her seat. The remains of a few torn MRE packages rested between them, but she'd only felt inclined to pick at hers, though she'd choked down enough sawdust-like peanut butter and stale crackers to last her a lifetime, she thought.
She swallowed hard, her throat parched, an uncomfortable dry and scratchy feeling sitting at the back of her tongue—like her mouth was filled with sand. And that wasn't just because of the godawful peanut butter-y substance. She needed water, for sure, but she'd already completely drained one of the water bottles from the survival gear the Carnivale Rosa had deigned to give her. Rebecca was...
hesitant to drink any more, mainly for fear of not finding any clean water in the near future.
The medic glanced down at her forearm, the pads of her fingers idly rubbing over a faint, red-tinged patch she had created from scratching. She'd forced herself to stop picking at it, but the impulse was
still there, regardless—gnawing at her, making her want to practically claw her own skin off with her short, blunt fingernails.
A feverish, uncomfortably
warm feeling gathered at her temples, and a sudden dread seized Rebecca's heart. Was she... infected with something? Was whatever was causing her symptoms related to the sickly, rotten smell that pervaded the bunker? But no—the others seemed fine. Holmes had been standing next to her this entire time, perfectly hale and hearty. It
couldn't be that!
It had to be just her imagination. She was overtired and had spent way too long wandering around out in the freezing cold. She was bound to feel... off.
"Look at this, dear doctor," declared Holmes with a sudden burst of energy, leaning over her shoulder and jabbing his finger at the screen. It displayed a map of the Site Seven facility, each section marked in glaring red. "This layout clearly indicates that we are currently situated in a specialized bunker, which connects to the emergency tunnels between the Security and Biological wings."
"The Security and Biological wings?" Rebecca repeated softly, her voice sounding far away and weak, even to her own ears. "That... can't be anything good."
For more than a few reasons, she mentally noted. A stab of phantom pain over her breast-bone made her involuntarily hunch in her seat, curling in on herself like a wounded animal, one hand palming at the site through her bulletproof vest.
Rebecca cast a fleeting glance towards Moran, who stood sentry by the door that led to the depths of the bunker, presumably to the aforementioned emergency access tunnels. The Colonel maintained a relaxed posture, yet her keen blue eyes scoured the dim passageway ahead, her expression tense and her grip on her rifle firm.
"Indeed, but it appears to be our only viable option, unless we wish to brave the storm a second time," responded Holmes, his gaze fixated on the flurry of red flashing lights on the monitor. He tapped his tobacco pipe idly against his lips, though it remained unlit, even under such dire circumstances that surely might have called for a little artificial relief. "The facility seems to have fallen under strict control. Nearly two thirds of the personnel have met their end or vanished without a trace..."
Nibbling on her bottom lip, Rebecca's forest green eyes flitted down to the somewhat crumpled emergency response protocols folder, its envelope contents splayed out on the desk beside the keyboard. Her hand toyed idly with the papers she'd drawn from one envelope in particular—the one labelled 'DAVE Containment Failure,' which had already been conspicuously open when she'd begun thumbing through everything.
"And whoever's left standing are hiding from this...
DAVE and whatever havoc it caused, after shutting communications down," she paused, her brows drawing together, rubbing the trembling fingers of one hand over her lips. "Do you believe reinforcements are coming from the Carnivale's headquarters?"
With a grim expression, Holmes raised his eyes to meet hers. "I believe
we are the reinforcements at this juncture, Dr. Chambers. Whether we desire it or not."
As he finished speaking, Holmes cast a pointed glance at the sectioned-off employee quarters behind them.
They'd done a quick sweep of them earlier—finding tattered bed sheets reduced to ribbons and marred with browning, rusty crimson stains, along with the splintered remnants of furniture that looked as if they had been slashed and stabbed apart with some form of bladed implement.
After Rebecca had cracked open the arm components of the deactivated humanoid robot with her survival knife, it had been easy enough to figure out
where the damage had likely originated from. It possessed firearms and wicked, sharp-edged blades embedded inside its servos, hidden beneath the battered, bullet-ridden casing of its metal chassis. Evidently, the machine had caught some sleeping individuals... with their defenses down.
Rebecca couldn't fight back a shiver.
"Maybe so. I don't know." Her voice quivered as she spoke, fragile and barely above a whisper. "Before this, I was in my own little world, conducting research in my lab. I was... not quite happy, but at least content. It wasn't perfect, but it was something I could do. I felt like I was making a difference. And that's a rare and precious thing, isn't it? To do some good, even when everything else seems to be falling apart."
She shook her head, gritting her teeth, her eyes clenching tightly shut behind her glasses. God, her head
hurt. "And now I find myself
here. I care about what happens to these people, Mr. Holmes. Really, I do. I can't help that—I'm only human. Medicine, healing... it's what I live for. But I can't help but feel—"
They've brought this on themselves, she wanted to say. But the words got stuck in her throat, the band of cold, black metal wrapped around her neck nearly choking the life out of her.
Instead, what came out was: "I can't help but feel that this place would do well to stay buried under the ice, Mr. Holmes. This facility and everyone in it."
His deerstalker cap casting a slight shadow over his features, Holmes brooded in silence for a long, weighty moment, pondering her words with the gravity they deserved. When he spoke next, it was with a slow, deliberate cadence, as if each word possessed a power all their own that he wanted to impress into her mind.
"Perhaps you are correct, my dear doctor," he murmured, looking again at the terminal's flashing screen. "Yet we must
persist, as you stated before. Thread by thread, piece by piece, we will unravel the secrets of this facility. If we do not, I fear we might meet a terrible end. And would it not be better to try to do something about it, rather than stew in misery? I certainly believe so."
"How optimistic," Sebastian Moran called over her shoulder from her post by the door, her tone laced with impatience. She prodded at the downed robot with the toe of her boot, sneering as its head sparked uselessly, the stun baton jutting out like the pillar of a ruined temple. "Now, are you two quite finished prattling over there? We don't want to keep our
terrible end waiting, after all."
Nodding, Rebecca pushed herself away from the terminal and stood, wincing as the room proceeded to
spin around her. As she stumbled, one hand grasping feebly at the cold surface of the table as a wave of dizziness washed over her, she felt Holmes' warm hand on her shoulder—steadying her. Grounding her.
"Are you well, Doctor Chambers?" he asked, concern coloring his voice as he peered into her face, his clever green eyes narrowed in worry. Moran, too, she noted, glanced sharply over.
Genuinely struggling against the urge to vomit, Rebecca swallowed thickly, her delicate features twisting in a grimace. But she forced a smile, shrugging off his hand.
"I'm
fine," she insisted for what felt like the millionth time today, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "Just feeling a bit
off. But I'd be surprised if I didn't, at this point..."
As she moved towards the door, she glanced back at Stitch and Wunya. They were standing by the rows of lockers, the shotgun between them.
When Wunya glanced up, Rebecca gave the silver-haired half-orc a quick, jaunty thumbs-up, a small smile tugging at her lips. Then, she turned towards the door where Colonel Moran and Holmes both stood, waiting for her.
Sucking in a deep, hissing breath between her teeth, she steeled herself and carefully stepped over the sparking corpse of the robot, moving into the darkness beyond.
A step behind her, Moran
wrenched the stun baton from the robot's skull with a harsh yank, holding the crackling, blue-sparking rod ahead of them to light the way.
PARTY MEMBERS: Rebecca Chambers, Sebastian Moran (Summon), Sherlock Holmes.
CURRENT LOCATION: The Western Bunker.
DESIRED LOCATION: Heading into the emergency access tunnels connected to the bunker.
ACTION(S): Looting the stun baton. Our party would like to head into the emergency access tunnels, heading towards the Biological Wing.
FOCUS COUNT: 3/3
REBECCA STATS: REASON 11, STAMINA 12
INVENTORY: Profile Consumables, Survival Gear, Loot Listed Below.
STATUS: Spore incubation stage. Lethargy, loss of appetite, nausea, heightened thirst.
CURRENT LOOT:
- Whetstone.
- S.T.A.R.S. Captain PDA.
- Sunglasses.
- Voltage checkers.
- Battered old laptop (burnt out, but would love to return this to Wily! Lol.)
- Programming manuals.
- Technical AI documents.
- Pince-nez style glasses.
- Legal pad (Carnivale contestants' names listed).
- Psychology manuals.
- Site Seven notebook.
- Ring of Keys.
- Site Seven Emergency Response Protocols folder.
- Stun Baton.