V Nidhogg

[The Future Warrior]

Everything felt...slow. Hazy. Like looking at a recording of events set to playback more slowly than real-time, viewed through a distortion lens. Something like the crackle of static filled the air, and there was an unpleasant acrid odor of something burning.

The sensations were nauseating, she suspected. That would have been the word someone with the organic composition to feel such a thing used to describe it all. It was certainly apt here; if she had had a stomach, it would be churning horribly right now. Churning much like the entire location she now resided in, wherever it may have been. She could recognize none of it, save for that it seemed to be composed of...wood.

"Odd..." Even her own voice, as she spoke, sounded strange and distant, as if it came through a curtain of water.

...water?

That was right. It took a monumental effort of will on her part, but she managed to sit up, and the feeling of horrible static and haze in the air momentarily grew far more severe before abruptly halting once she was upright. Her vision seemed to clear, providing her with a sudden sense of clarity and composure that felt even more startling than the nauseating disruptions had been. She had been in the rain just moments ago, she was positive. Stepped outside the business offices, and tried to gain her bearings so she could plot her next course...

Lightning.

She had registered the flash of lightning, and heard -- felt, more than anything -- the impact of it. The horrible crackling, sparking and whining of metal being overloaded, and her internal diagnostic sensors going absolutely haywire. Systems were shorting out and rebooting in complete chaos. Her own awareness had been fragmentary, and she had barely registered the worrying notice of a warning of emergency spatial translocation systems having been activated. Then everything had simply turned into an all-consuming blaze of blue-white light and static electricity.

Her internal clocks and chronometers were thrown completely off, but they were a simple fix thankfully and if they had managed to right themselves at all...it had been at least several days since her sudden jump through space-time and subsequent hard reboot to purge the excess voltage. The original chaos and hazy distortion upon her awakening just now was the last remnants of lingering static being purged from her systems as they finally restarted. That...and some interference from something in the atmosphere, or nearby vicinity.

She couldn't tell where she was, only that by a quick measure of atmospheric composition it was not the same world she had just been on. Wherever her unfortunately-timed activation of emergency teleportation had sent her to, it was a different world entirely.

"This is very frustrating..." She slowly took another look around, trying to ascertain where she had wound up this time, already far more frustrated than she had been during her first awakening n the ruins. Far more than simply frustrated, she was bordering on anger. But that roiling turmoil and near-fury slowly abated and died down, to be replaced with confusion. If she was judging things correctly, then her current position appeared to be...

"A ship."

Not just any ship, either; but a truly ancient one. A wooden vessel, and one that looked to have been abandoned and left to rot for an uncountable number of years. Splinters were visibly showing in many places, the growth of mold was evident in others. Large chunks and sections had warped and twisted out of place, nails were bent and barely hanging on in a worrying number of places. The sound of water dripping distantly, and the musty smell of ancient water (likely once for drinking) long gone stagnant permeated the entire space.

She appeared to be somewhere in one of the holds, well belowdeck. The fact that such a place was even large enough for someone of her stature to sit up at all -- which she now noticed she could do so, and still have ample clearance overhead -- was a confusing fact. Even such ships built for humans had been of notoriously low clearance in many lower decks, requiring even those of average height to sometimes stoop and duck.

"Bizarre..." She leaned forward to place a hand on the floor, and push herself up. She had intended to simply rise up to her knees, then into a crouching walk as she had done before in the business area...but found that she had no need to. She was certain the roof overhead had only been a foot or two clear when she was sitting, but as she stood up to her full height she didn't come anywhere close to hitting it. It stretched overhead, sagging timbers and splinters all, still nearly two feet clear of her hitting it.

"I believe at this moment most would be terribly unsettled and deeply confused," Ashe muttered to herself, as she peered about in the gloom. Aside from the abnormal inconsistency of the ship's vertical dimensions, everything else appeared...mostly untouched and unchanged. There was a thick, bitingly cold fog of thick gray that swirled around the floor, rising up to nearly her knees, and it was incredibly dark and hard to see much of anything. The hooks for hanging lanterns were empty in all places save one, and the glass in it had long ago been smashed out. "How familiar..."

She resigned herself to this new ordeal, and with any curiosity she may have felt already being replaced by a far greater quantity of bitter displeasure, she slowly paced forward over the creaking floorboards toward the door out of this room. With any luck, the ship would hold together long enough for her to find something of use in making an egress from it.

 

[The Future Warrior]

Deep within the bowels of the ship, doing little more than feeling her way along with the faint illumination of her large eye, Ashe crept through the wooden halls. Even at a pace as slow as she was forced to go, this ship should not have taken so long to traverse as it did. Even the most gargantuan of wooden vessels had never been more than a hundred plus a few dozen meters in length, and she felt as if she had walked that distance twice over by now. It couldn't have been so, because that would mean whatever this vessel was it would have been closer to something such as an aircraft carrier, rather than any known wooden vessel. Such a prospect was...all but impossible. She knew full well that size limits had begun to rear their heads only shortly past the hundred meter mark with the construction methods of wooden ships. Harsh weather and heavy seas made them distort and flex, causing leaking and flooding.

This didn't look like the bottom most deck or hold, but she could see no sign of any abundance of water seeping on, nor of any indication there were the necessary pumps to evacuate it from belowdecks...which left her even more puzzled. Was this ship really such a gargantuan size, without any structural integrity issues? Had they perhaps made the interior hull of wood and surrounded it with a steel shell to prevent leaking? That seemed an absurd plan, but she supposed would have been at least mildly effective. She was not programmed with an abundance of information on nautical vessels and their construction methods, so could not really venture more guesses than that.

The size of this ship was not the only thing which was astounding, though. More than that it was the silence of it all. There was the errant creak of wood, the distant sound of water and waves against the hull...but nothing else. No sound of movement or crew from anywhere. Her own footsteps, try as she might to remain quiet, echoed with a reverberating boom each time boot met wooden floor. As if some trickster was following her with a huge drum, striking it in time to every step, the ship announced her passage for anyone and everyone to hear.

"Loud enough to wake the dead...I believe the saying goes," she murmured.

And all at once, there was in fact another noise. A deeply disturbing, unsettling noise: the echoing, horribly distorted noise of a thousand voices, chorusing together in raucous laughter. It came from no direction, seeming to echo from the very timbers of the ship itself, setting the entire thing to shaking and rumbling as if about to tear itself apart.

All at once a pale, etheral light bathed the hold. The ruined and rusted fixtures where lanterns and candles once hung bursting to life with flickering and nearly transparent flames of sickly blue and green. They burned and sputtered, seeming to flit in and out of cohesive shapes, the leering and grinning specter of something almost like a face cackling in mad glee flashing in and out of sight, jumping from flame to flame as if some mad jester prancing and cavorting about the chairs of his king's banquet table.

It made even Ashe, logic-driven as she was, seize up and stare in surprised, terrified awe.

"Loud enough to wake the dead, ye say!" a voice rang out, clear and loud. It rumbled and growled, deeper than anything human and seeming to echo from four different places at once. "A most interestin' choice of words ya've made there, lass." All at once, the noise of the ocean against the hull grew worse, the sound of thunder crashing in the distance just as a huge wave rocked the ship with enough force to send Ashe stumbling across the deck, slamming into one of the walls.

As she bounced off of it, she spun about to prepare and brace herself with her arms and stop from crashing into another wall...and succeeded. Just in time to prevent herself from being thrown into the jagged, splintered ends of a spiked deathtrap: one of the beams from overhead had collapsed, hanging halfway down into this level with its broken and jagged ends now standing less than a foot form her chest. Old and dusty, many of them broken off and blunted, but still surely as deadly as any purpose-crafted spike trap.

The skeletal remains of a humanoid, slumped in a pile under the broken chunk of beam with its rib cage utterly pulverized and jaws open in what eerily rose into her mind as a scream of utter agony and despair, cemented that notion.

The sound of rushing wind filled the hold, and another peal of thunder crashed in the skies outside as a second wave rocked the ship. This one sent her stumbling into a fall and chaotic tumble into one of the walls, and through a gaping pit in the boards of the deck. She barely registered the thought that she was positive there had been no such holes in the floor, even as dark as it had been, before she landed -- HARD.

The impact was jarring, and briefly made her vision flicker with static as numerous warnings and indicators of how such impacts were inadvisable without defensive measures online flashed across her readouts. She lay there, sprawled on her back and trying to muster up the will to clear all these accursed warnings and notifications, when the sound of boots slowly thudding across the deck reached her ears.

Staring up through the hole, she witnessed the slow and methodical approach of a humanoid figure. He was absolutely horrid to look at, his face merely a leathery mask of withered flesh stretched taut over his skull, and even half of that was flayed off. The bone beneath was scarred and gouged, with several teeth missing from his grinning maw. One eye was an empty socket, the tattered scraps of an eyepatch hanging uselessly over it, while the other was filled with a piercingly bright orb of blue flame. He was draped in what might have once been a splendidly gaudy uniform all but typical of pirates, though was now a ragged and molded mess. Eaten through with holes, scorchmarks and burns, to say nothing of the countless rents and tears from blades and bullets. A short curved blade hung at one hip, and an impossible profusion of pistols hung strapped all about his frame. A single ring on his hand, adoring the finger he let point down at her, glimmered red in the pale light. "We don' take kindly to trespassers an' stowaways here, missie. So ye can consider yerself lucky I'm in a charitable mood, and enjoy yer stay in the brig."

He cackled with mad glee as he turned and strode away, the sharp impact of what she glimpsed as an iron-shod peg leg announcing the ship to begin creaking and shifting as the floorboards started to peel and curl up to fill in the hole she had tumble through. As the boards filled in and sealed the hole entirely, utter blackness overtook Ashe's vision, and she was left again with only the noise and sound of waves and motion of the ship.

And the cruel, amused cackling of a thousand unseen voices.

 

[The Future Warrior]

The mocking laughter at her expense went on for several seconds before it slowly faded, as if one voice at a time dropping out of the haunting chorus until eventually...all had lapsed into silence. When they had quieted, the veil of silence which resumed was deafening. Within the dark, musty depths of the impossibly colossal ship, Ashe struggled to right herself again, having to carefully and slowly feel about for where it was safe to set her weight and where she wouldn't simply collide with anything. It had been dark above, but down here it was completely pitch black, and even the mild illumination of her luminous eye seemed suffocated and snuffed out. She couldn't even make out her hand when she at one point literally pressed it directly against her eye, such was the level of blackness she had fallen into.

It was unnerving and made things difficult, to be certain, but it didn't really bother terribly much. The skeletal figure who had strutted about with the authority only the captain of a vessel could had had ample opportunity to strike her, or visit severe harm to her in the confusing encounter. He had instead chosen to somehow toss her down below, into the deepest holds of the ship, and leave her there. It was a kind of decision which could only be born from arrogance or a capricious demeanor veiling an utter lunatic. For all she knew, he might decide to return at any time and renege on his 'charitable mood'.

The power he seemed to wield over this vessel, in whatever fashion he exerted it, was more dangerous than he himself was. She had information in her records, fragmented as it was, of some tests of several 'super soldier' projects using various means, such as nanotechnology and myriad applications of genetic splicing and grafts to grant startling levels of regeneration and resilience. Someone being quite literally burned alive until they were little more than a charred skeleton, and continuing to function at some level as their flesh slowly healed, was not unheard of. The psychological damage it often resulted in, however...would not have left most capable of the awareness and capability to make even such fickle decisions as this ghastly grinning ghoul had done.

And the bizarre light in his eye...

"I fear this may be something beyond my understanding," she murmured. "Just like the energon before...the energy signatures and levels were like nothing identified. The same can be said of the fog blanketing the upper levels of this ship, and the mysterious powers of its captain." There had long been fierce debate and study into whether the supernatural was real. Whether supposed ghosts and the sightings of ghost ships at sea were real or merely the stories of terrified and exhausted soldiers and sailors. The eerie consistency of such tales, taken from all corners of the globe and from sources which had never been in contact, gave it an uneasy air of legitimacy. It was never proved, but it had always had a sizable amount of funding and a dedicated team set aside to continue researching it.

Just in case.

This situation she had found herself in now, however... It rang eerily similar to those old rumors. The ghoulish pirate, the sudden flare of those sickly blue-green flames, the voices from nowhere, unnatural storms, and the impossible size and contortions of the ship. Parts of it could be explained away as simple coincidence, or as carefully orchestrated trickery using concealed technology and tools.

....but not all of it. Not all at once, in so seamless and terrifying a fashion.

It was an impossible thing to grapple with, and the logical parts of her mind simply wouldn't accept it. Ghosts? Spirits? Magic? A literal, actual ghost ship, with an undead captain? Completely absurd.

But on the other hand...that human part of her mind. The one programmed to simulate the mind of one unbound by pure logic, able to be emotional and grow beyond itself...that part of her mind was utterly terrified, and all too ready to accept this entire thing as very, very real. The work of an undead captain, in absolute command of every inch of his ship -- ever last splinter, nail, ruptured timber and molded barrel. Controlling it directly was the only conceivable explanation for the way the floor had split open, the boards and planks just curling and melting away only to seamlessly twist and flow back into place as they had.

It filled her with unease, because if it was true, then she was utterly lost. Science and logic had no bearing against the realm of the dead. She could fight as well as any soldier could hope to, and could visit untold damage upon the ship itself. But what good would that do, if its captain could simply repair it or change it so it had never been done? What other powers might the cadaverous figure possess? The chilling rumors of those who had encountered ghost ships never being seen again circulated in her head.

She resolved swiftly that she would seek the most immediate route of egress possible, and remain on high alert to not let the captain get the drop on her again, and so that she would be ready to flee.

To where, she did not know...but staying still would do nothing but make her an easy target.

 

[The Future Warrior]

That thick, suffocatingly dense and cold gray fog from above was down here as well, she eventually concluded. In this pitch blackness she couldn't see it, but she could certainly feel it, almost seeming to curl and wind around her legs like a living thing as she slowly picked her way through the brig of this accursed ship. It was a level of chill which couldn't be at all natural, and felt as if it would bring most toppling over in a shivering and aching pile in short order. It didn't feel...actually, truly cold exactly, but it was a kind of strange numbing sensation. Almost like it just robbed and sapped strength from one's limbs, leaving only a feeling of leaden dead weight, and the aching chill of terrible exhaustion.

....or something to that effect, she would imagine. It registered only as a surface-level feeling to her, and didn't truly set in. If she were to do something as foolish as to flop over and lay down in it, as she had been upon first rebooting, it would probably be quite different. She suspected that the oddity of these gray fog clouds had something to do with just how out of sorts she had been in those first few moments, where everything had been so distorted and difficult to clearly process.

Luckily she had no intention of doing any such thing. Lying down again would accomplish nothing in this instance. Only continuing to move forward, in whatever direction she was headed, had any hope of any results at all.

She did of course consider, however briefly, simply trying to break through the roof over her head and clamber back up to the deck above. No sooner had she thought such a thing and reached up to see if the roof was in her reach, however...did she come to find that it was beyond the length of her arm. Try as she might, stretching to her limit, she could feel nothing above her. No trace of the wooden floor of the higher deck, nor of the support beams and cross-bracings she knew must run through the ship at some point. Regardless of how often she checked, or how far to one side or another she tried to go, it was the same. The same slightly curved, damp floor shrouded in that chilling fog up to her knees.

"This begins to grow absurd...how big is this ship?!" she finally growled, even her mechanically-driven patience beginning to reach its limits. "This is absurd...it should not be this high, nor should it be anywhere near this long. Its proportions and scale are completely illogical!" And in her frustration, one arm swung out...and with a crunching of splintering wood and breaking glass, her clenched fist struck something solid. It was enough to momentarily shock her from her growing frustration to slowly peer over at the sight. Her fist had hit the wooden hull of the ship, and spreading out from it in a spider-web pattern were glimmering lines of white in the blackness of the brig.

They spread and scattered all across the surrounding area, the sound of fracturing and creaking glass echoing and rising in pitch to a deafening wail...before all at once it shattered with a noise like a car smashing through a storefront window. The pitch blackness was gone in an instant, replaced with the same murky haze as had been on the deck above. That odd, eerie blue-green light could be seen sparkling and filtering through the odd crack in the board.

"An...illusion?" She slowly peered around at her surroundings again. The brig was fairly large, but still only perhaps thirty meters on a side. To be going for as long as she had been mindlessly wandering...had she been walking in literal circles? There were several inches of musty, stagnant water filthy with black and green growths of mold and algae ruining any hope of seeing if she had left tracks or prints, but... She had been so sure she was walking in a straight line the entire time. She had veered off this way and that, trying to find the walls, but always kept going forward. Apparently she had been within arm's reach of the wall for at least a while now, though.

The more pressing oddity, however...was the roof. It loomed close now, only a scant few inches above her head. She barely had to lift her arm at all before her hand brushed against it.

"This is incredibly bizarre..." It was not only bizarre, but altogether difficult to explain or understand. An undead pirate, with a ship at his utter control, and now strange hallucinations or illusions and an apparent inability to actually control herself properly? The lost hours to walking in circles -- wait, hours?! Her internal measurements confirmed it had, in fact, been almost eight hours spent aimlessly wandering. In a circle, no less. It had only seemed like minutes at most. Were these strange influences enough to fool even her mechanical senses?

....she grew even more disturbed and found it harder to fight down that very human feeling of panic and fear rising in her thoughts. A tightness in her chest, a knot tying in her gut...things humans would feel, with their squishy vulnerable organs, she knew. She didn't have that same anatomy, but she could feel the same kind of unease now setting in. She was expendable, and prepared for death or deactivation at any moment...but at least that would be against a foe she could understand and fight against. She would be blown apart doing what she was supposed to do.

Not...this. Not taunted and tormented by forces she couldn't even begin to comprehend.

If she had a stomach, she was sure she would have emptied its contents all over the floor by now, from her growing worries and stress.

 

[The Future Warrior]

The ship again rocked and lurched suddenly, with the sound of a monstrous wave impacting it. It sent Ashe stumbling across the brig, and she only barely managed to remain on her feet. She did thankfully manage to avoid smashing against the opposite wall or the floor above, as such things would likely have been quite unpleasant to say the least. To say nothing of the virtual sludge that lined the floor down here.

"The longer I spend in this place, the more I consider simply trying to break through the hull and take my chances with the waters outside..."

That was an utterly ridiculous notion, she knew. It wasn't as if she couldn't swim at all, but...rather that she was not exactly exceptionally buoyant. It would be an uphill struggle to avoid simply sinking down to whatever waited in the depths below. To say nothing of the risks posed by the crushing pressure and freezing temperatures so prevalent at such abyssal reaches.

"STEADY AS SHE GOES, YA SCURBY BLIGHTERS!" The voice rang out through the ship, echoing and ringing as if spoken from just the other side of the hold. "BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES; WE ALREADY GOT ALL THE WATER WE NEED!"

The notion took her a moment to process, as she just looked up in confusion...precisely in time to have a deluge of frigid, salty spray hit her directly in the face. Sea water, flooding over the decks and down through the different holds. Right through the abundance of holes and gaps in the floor above to deliver an altogether unpleasant 'hello' to the war machine locked in the ship's bowels. She simply slowly lowered her head, letting the ocean water drip away and silently fuming at the absurdity of this entire scenario.

It did of course raise another issue, as well; if the hatches above had now been secured, then that would be just one more obstacle in her way of making it topside to try and arrange an escape off of this damned ship. She was positive that if this were any kind of normal vessel, she could easily brute force her way through the simple and (relatively, of course) primitive wooden hatches. This particular one though...

It wouldn't surprise her if they suddenly decided to flex like rubber, or become hard as steel, or even bite her. Something absurd and impossible to predict, but impossible to break past with straight brute force. She would just have to tackle that problem when she got to it, however.

It was still dim down here and full of a murky gloom, but at least there was the smallest traces of light to see by. And that light illuminated one thing: the actual stairs, and the doorway they lead up to. They were rickety and looked terribly unsteady, making her uneasily question if they would even bear her weight...but then she quickly realized that even if they didn't, she should have no trouble in climbing up through the door on her own.

Slowly she trudged and slogged through the mildew-ridden sludge and the spectral clouds hanging over the floor, and then tentatively placed one boot on the lowest stair. Barely half of her foot could find purchase on the step, and it groaned and creaked alarmingly with the sound of wood splintering as she put more and more weight forward...but against all odds and likelihood, it held. She had no idea how it possibly could have, but it held. She stepped forward, leaning up and over the stairs toward the door and carefully fiddling with the handle.

"Locked...of course." With a grimace, she clenched her outstretched hand into a fist and brought her arm back. "I don't have the patience for something more delicate. My apologies, Captain." And her fist rocketed forward, striking the wooden portal like a piledriver.

The imapct was startling, and sent a groaning, squealing ripple through the wood. It splintered and buckled, the door bowing nearly in two before caving inward as its hinges gave up entirely, clattering in two separate pieces on the floor of the hall beyond. That was more or less as expected, but...the sudden, deafening silence was not. The sound of rain, of the waves, the ship creaking and rocking in the seas...all of it, gone.

Gone, and replaced with only the eerie silence of a tomb. And the skin-tingling feeling of something watching.

Something angry.

 

[The Future Warrior]

The sudden overwhelming feeling of unease which descended upon her was strong motivation for her to get out of the brig. Working her way through the doorway, however, was far from an easy task. Despite the strange scale of everything else she had encountered on this ship, the door itself still seemed sized as one would expected on a human-crewed vessel. The simple dimensions of the door made it an extremely difficult prospect to squeeze herself through it. She was certain that it wouldn't be hard to just force it, breaking the frame and nearby timbers to widen the portal, but...

That lingering feeling of something angry, something predatory watching her...

She was positive that causing any further damage to this ship wold end very, very badly for her.

....and then it happened. She felt it first, before anything else: the feeling of something jagged and sharp suddenly clamping down around her midsection, still lodged in the doorway. She was stunned and surprised, caught on her side and unable to easily shift to look at it. It felt...off. There was nothing there but the wood and iron nails of the doorframe, and yet what was applying pressure to her midsection felt disturbingly like teeth. Like a mouth full of razor sharp, jagged predator's teeth. Biting down, grinding and tearing as if to simply shear through her entire body.

Immediately, warning and notifications of surface damage and abrasions began flashing across her internal readouts. She didn't feel pain, which she was suddenly immensely thankful for, but this...this was still a terribly unsettling experience.

In the darkness she reached and groped blindly for the wall behind her, searching for the doorframe to try and take stock of what was going on. She tried to twist about, perhaps onto her back, but that only served to turn the gnawing and biting jaws into a set of spinning blades, tearing through her synthetic skin. They bit down into the metal beneath, squealing and grinding as the sound of wood breaking and splintering echoed through the halls of the cursed vessel.

And then the entire thing shook, rippling and shuddering. Like some great, living beast writing in pain or recoiling from an unexpected shock. The biting jaws fell away, leaving her momentarily free, and she reacted as swiftly as she could muster the strength to. Her rear-set arms grasped at anything they could behind her, fingers breaking through rotten sections of floor and taking hold to pull and yank herself back. Front arms pushed against the doorframe and wall, shoving herself back and away.

With a sound somewhere between the squealing groan of wood being stressed well past its breaking point and the angry snarl of a vicious jungle beast, the doorframe suddenly yawned wide and then slammed shut, sealing the portal off entirely into a mass of gnarled, jagged spines of wood. So fierce was the display, that chunks of the frame exploded outward, foot long splinter-missiles shot through with the securing nails. The fusillade hit Ashe nearly entirely in her upper torso, the wood and metal striking in a haphazard mess. Many of the bits and chunks were left buried where they had struck, sticking out of her synthetic flesh at crazy angles and leaving her looking like a target dummy at an explosives range.

Countless readouts and warnings continued to parade through her internal readouts and diagnostics. Thus far, it was no more than surface damage. Her skin was shredded and torn in numerous places, but her internal skeleton and metal casings had suffered only minor abrasions, dents and a single puncture. Not enough to seriously impede or damage functionality in the short term, but another incident or two like that...

"To think that something as benign as trying to crawl through a door could do such damage..." That human part of her mind was being less and less quiet and easy to silence, as it screamed and shivered in terror. This was unnatural. This wasn't right, this was completely absurd and illogical; this was clearly nothing other than something supernatural. A ghost ship, exactly like the ones of legend. She was not equipped to deal with this, even if she had had access to every last one of her dormant systems and capabilities.

"....escape," she said, quietly and slowly. "Must...escape." Slowly, she rolled over onto her front and took a knee, rising up to stand. Not even bothering to brush aside the gruesome display of shredded wood and nails perforating her body, she rose up to stand in a slight crouch, and began moving forward again. "Carefully. Keep aware for further dangers. Do not get caught unawares again..."

 

[The Future Warrior]

Her desperate efforts to try and escape this cursed ship were cut abruptly and violently short, not a minute after her last brush with danger. As if a wild beast recoiling from pain and surprise but not yet ready to fully retreat, the ship and its captain had left her alone for a brief time, silently watching and observing. The damage which had been done, earning no blood and no signs of any restrictions to her continued movement, was deemed superficial.

The typical 'scare' tactics weren't going to work.

That was why, when the ship again began groaning and creaking around her, Ashe was nervous. It was only logical and sensible, in her mind, to not try the same tactic twice in a row. It was what she would do, just keep switching it up and trying everything until something worked. So whatever was coming next was bound to be--

BANG.

A sound like a gunshot, and suddenly the corridor was filled with a crackling glow of that eerie blue-green light radiating over every surface, sparking and sputtering off of every nail and loose bit of metal in the walls and ceiling like hundreds of tiny eyes. More worrying than that, though, there was a huge, blackened ring of metal -- the same which normally fit into the doors on ships like these as a viewing window -- now lodged in her chest. Its edges were ripped and twisted into serrations by the force of its sudden ejection from its door, turning it into a veritable sawblade.

The impact of it would have no doubt torn an ordinary human in half, and it was nearly enough to punch a hole clean through even her; only a few inches of it were still visible, jutting out of her torso. The odd mixture of colors leaking out from her ruptured internals, black and amber and silver and neon blue...it might have been a pretty sight, were it not dropping from such a grisly tear in something so unmistakable from human flesh.

CRITICAL DAMAGE DETECTED. RECOMMEND ACTIVATING EMERGENCY OVERRIDE: DEFENSIVE MATRIX. PROCEED?

The warning flashed over her internal readouts, and she didn't even bother with thinking about why that was even a question, frantically agreeing to the proposal and beginning the activation. It would take several minutes, which she was terrified she might not have, but it was the best she could manage in the current situation.

Another round of groaning and squealing wood, and a profusion of sickening little pop sounds began to go off, akin to firecrackers, echoing down the entire corridor. Sparks and bolts of that green-blue light arced and flashed across it, leaping from one exposed nail to another, turning it into something which set off alarm bells as visually looking like a plasma net.

Streaks of the ghostly flame shot down the hall, lancing and jumping along the walls and ceiling and floor like bloodthirsty, diminutive hounds on the attack charge.

And then they hit her. Supercharged with the spectral radiance, even the tiny nails -- normally no worse than splinters -- hit her like a flechette gun. With a horrid sound somewhere between tearing paper and crackling of stale bread, the nails and splinters and chunks of door hinges hit her and tore through her. Huge chunks of synthetic skin were ripped apart, flayed off and scorched under the impact. She didn't feel pain, but she certainly felt it all. And it didn't feel good.

She staggered back from the sheer force of it, nearly knocked off her feet and bringing her arms up to defend her more vulnerable torso and head -- just in time as a large, iron spike hit her forearm and pierced it through, stopping only inches from her eye. A second one hit, tearing through her shoulder and making one arm fall limply at her side.

"E-Enough; enough!" she called out. A desperate tactic; but she knew that sometimes, in the history of warfare and even among pirates, an active surrender would be enough to bring hostilities to a halt. "I yield!"

The onslaught of ghostly devastation ceased in an instant...only to be replaced with the slow, methodical creeeaaak-thunk-thump of heavy, labored footsteps. One with a heavy gait, and one leg made of what sounded uncannily like iron. From down the hall, the haze of smoke and ghost fire parted like curtains, revealing the ghoulish figure of the captain. "Surrender, do ya?" he asked, with an edge to his words that suggested uncomfortably as if he might be mocking her. "A shame, that. If only you'd thought of that a few minutes ago, before you had to go and DAMAGE MY SHIP!"

The sudden increase in volume of his voice hit her like a physical wall, sending her stumbling back in surprise. "Captain Ordine doesn't give second chances, lass. You had your one go at it all when I tossed ye in the brig." He continued his pace forward, one skeletal hand reaching down for the cutlass hanging at his hip. "And ya wasted it right quick."

With a sudden speed she could scarcely comprehend, the undead buccaneer went form the other end of the hall to right before her, his skull twisting unnaturally into a leering grin as his blade swept up. With a crunching noise of steel shearing through steel, the spectral blade hit her right arm at the bicep...and tore through it like it was little more than straw, sending the appendage sailing away end over end, spraying a chaotic mixture of her internal fluids everywhere.

Her expression twisted into something truly resembling fear, then. She tried to back away, scrambling with her two remaining functional arms, but it was little use. She hadn't realized it before, but the damage done to her...all the impacts individually were little more than surface wounds and flesh tearing injuries, but together they had managed to mask the few deeper wounds. Ones which had damaged her greater motor functions. It was all she could do to drag herself along with two arms, and her legs were nearly useless.

"But I'm not a monster. I know when someone's beaten." In his free hand, the captain reached up into his tattered coat, drawing out a long-barreled pistol. Whether it was made of gold or brass, or just simply corroded into looking as such was hard to tell. But as he brought it to bear, slowly leveling it at her head...she could swear the barrel of that gun was as wide as the hallway. "So I'll just execute you clean and simple, no more o' this drawn out nonsense." He grinned, with a mirthless chortle. "Give me regards to Davy Jones, ya great metal wench."

KA-CRACK.