D&D 5E Exodus

Juno shrugs at Babington's points. In the end, she's a grunt, not a tactician. She'd rather have a recon-in-force than a small team insertion. After all, a small team could get overwhelmed by a hypothetical enemy before they could report in. A stronger force, even if spotted, could form up and fall back to their own ship. But it's not up to her either.

"I'll follow orders," she says stoically to the Colonel. "We'll make it work, whatever you decide."

OOC: [MENTION=62721]MortalPlague[/MENTION], are you still with us?

The colonel glances at his watch, then sighs heavily, "Bloody civilians. Where the hell is Doctor Sanduine?"

He waits a few more moments then says, "I don't want to wait any longer. You two, take a full squad over there and check it out. Leave the Demon here. Radio in every 15 minutes. Identify anything salvageable for later recovery once the other ship is secure. Any questions?"

Airman Babington comes to attention and pops off a quick salute while answering the Colonel with a "Sir, no questions sir." Once they are dismissed, he heads back to his room to say goodbye to his wife and kids... just in case.

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Inside the door to their living space, he finds her pacing the floor. "Hey you." he says lamely, unsure of what else to say to her. "Hey." she reponds as she stops pacing and turns to face him. "They're sending me and some others with a squad of marines to check out the other Ark that we've found floating nearby. Should be just a quick recon and I'll be back before you know it."

"Unless you're not." she says as tears well up in her eyes and she flings herself into his arms to hug him tightly like she was never going to let go. He hugs her back for a long time before pulling away enough to look at her- tear soaked eye to tear soaked eye. "I have to go. It's my duty and I owe my service to those we could help, but I WILL be back. I promise. You and me- always & forever, remember?"

She nods and smiles up at him before pushing him towards the boys room to kiss them goodbye since they were asleep. She watched him, leaning against the doorframe, and then took his hand in hers while he gathered what he needed to report for duty. Then they hugged and kissed again at the front door one more time before he opened it and walked out, looking back at her in the doorway. "I love you. See ya later, hon.", he said to her but she was too choked up to reply with more than a wavering "I love you too.", before shutting the door after he rounded the corner out of sight, leaving her to slide down the wall to the floor where she sobbed quietly.

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Wiping tears from his eyes, Airman Babington made his way to the debarkation room to gear up with weapons and to meet the marines that were going with them. It looked like he was the first one there. Juno would be along shortly though, he was sure. Sitting on the bench in the locker room, he hoped that everything went well on the other Ark. He couldn't stand the thought of leaving Sheryl and the boys alone, but he had to do this. He still owed so many so much that he would not likely every repay the debt, but he had to try...

Juno saluted and departed the briefing the moment she was dismissed.

She downplayed the so-called 'demon effect,' at least as far as herself was concerned. Unlike some of the others, there hadn't been any strange powers manifesting. Not where people could see.

But she knew differently. She could feel the Ark in her head, somehow. It was like a memory, kind of. Even now, walking through the corridors, she knew what was on the deck above and below. Where the doors were, and which required what sort of authorization to use. She heard footsteps around the corner ahead and immediately understood that they were being made by a man and a woman, even before they turned into view. It wasn't that she hadn't known the ship backwards and forwards before...all that time doing patrols did that to a person...but this went past simple familiarity. It was the kind of intimate, instinctive harmony with a place that normally took a lifetime to develop.

Juno was the last person to want weird alien powers...but this felt different. It wasn't threatening. It wasn't even superhuman, in the sense that it was beyond human potential. Was that equivocating? She wasn't sure, and it bothered her.

And what other changes might be coming? What if it didn't stop with this?

She didn't go to her quarters...there was nothing there she needed. Instead she went down a deck and headed for the armory...but paused when she was passing the third elevator shaft. Without thinking Juno knew it led to residence blocs, starboard engineering, and the brig. Huh. Without quite processing why, she called the car and took it down to the brig.

There weren't many residents, and the ones there were mostly guilty of drinking too much, fighting too much, or, more likely, both at once. There was only one long-term inhabitant, down at the far end. That was the cell Juno went to. Inside, Demon sat on her cot, with some of the books she'd been given opened around her. The red-skinned almost-woman looked up at the door when she heard Juno's steps outside.

At least she'd started wearing clothes, at Juno's insistence. Baby steps, right?

"We found another ship," Juno said to the alien. "Do you know anything about that?" Demon didn't reply. There was no one to translate, but Juno suspected she understood more than she let on. "Another ship like this one."

Demon stared. "Likeah thisa won," she said, not appearing to understand.

"It's dead in space," Juno tried again, even though she knew it was fruitless. "Does it have something like you in it?"

Could you have done that to us? Could you still?

"Dedinspace," said the Demon, mangling the words into syllables of a single word. "Someting. Likeah you."

Juno closed her eyes for a moment. What had she expected? "Right. As you were."

From the brig she took a brief sojourn at the ladies room and went to get her gear. Normally for something like this, where quarters were close and speed wasn't a big deal, she'd want the inserts on her tactical vest...but when she tried it on it just felt too heavy. She wanted to stay light on her feet, maybe take point recon for the squad. Yeah. For weapons she picked out one of the combat shotguns...good for corridor-to-corridor fighting...and a large-caliber pistol she could load with penetrator rounds in case they came up against something too tough for the shottie to crack.

All that equipment didn't shake the growing sense of dread settling over her though. The Arks were far from defenseless. Finding a derelict one out in deep space...it felt bad. She didn't need weird alien instincts to tell her that, but it sure didn't help that they were.

She got to debarkation behind Babington, but just ahead of the rest of the team, and gave him a nod.

Ark 17

A squad of eight marines arrives, fully armed and ready to go.

Two heavy gunners, carrying grenade launchers and a complement of frag and smoke grenades, with automatic pistols as back-up. (Hayes, her nose now slightly crooked from her encounter with Dawson's elbow not so long ago, and Ramirez.)
Four regular infantry, carrying automatic rifles and automatic pistols. (Brooks, Anderson, Novak, and Dixon.)
One medic. (Castor.)
One Team Leader (Almerton, though he has been ordered to defer to Reyes.)

The shuttle crew consists of a pilot, co-pilot, and two technicians. The pilot, an Air Force Warrant Officer Gorman, gives Reyes a smile as the squad boards, "Well, this ought to be fun. We're going to dock on 42's aft outer ring port. Colonel says its vacant - which says to me that they launched one of their shuttles. Everyone ready to go?"

Ark 42

Akemi and Joy were sitting in the cramped crew quarters section of the forward outer ring of Ark 42. It was dark - main power had been lost two days ago. Rations were low, the air was getting heavy, and the 3000 plus survivors were starting to lose hope.

The launch from Earth had been chaotic. One of the shuttles, carrying more than a thousand people, hadn't quite docked when Colonel Munroe gave the order to activate the hyper drive. Some say he had panicked, that the enemy attack ships were still at least two minutes away. Others said he had made the right choice - sacrifice a thousand to save nearly 9000. Most of Ark 42's marine attachment had been on that shuttle, however.

Regardless, something strange had happened. Akemi and Joy and a few others on the ship heard voices, strange whispers in their minds, while the ship was in hyperspace. After nearly 9 hours in hyperspace, the hyperdrive deactivated on its own. Joy and Akemi and the others who had heard the voices felt drawn to the hyper drive, called to it, an urge they couldn't resist. When a biologist, Dr. Harold Thompson, touched the black egg-like hyper drive, it shattered. Inside was something out of a nightmare. An eight foot tall monster that vaguely resembled an orangutan with tusks jutting from its mouth, a feral yet intelligent red gleam in its eyes.

The creature took the crew by surprise, tearing apart what few military forces the ship had on board. Those who heard the voices...those who survived the beast's initial attack, were able to seal off the forward section of the outer ring. But that had left 6000 people with that...thing. The screams of the dying and the screeching howls of the creature echoed through the ship.

Dr. Alexander Locke, an astrophysicist and one of the "chosen" as he called those who heard the voices, had been the one to seal off the rest of the ship. With Colonel Munroe unaccounted for, he assumed command. That was five days ago. Two days ago, power had gone out. The screams were gone now...replaced by an unsettling silence.

Akemi was one of only 14 surviving military members left. The rest of the survivors were civilians. The 10 surviving "Chosen", including Akemi and Joy, had started to exhibit strange powers. Akemi had a level of endurance she'd never experienced before and an almost unnatural amount of luck. Joy, meanwhile, found she was able to soothe the panic of the survivors and inspire them to keep up hope. Dr. Alexander Locke demonstrated the most startling changes - he could conjure a spectral hand out of thin air and use it just like a regular hand up to 30 feet away.

Akemi Jordan


Petty Officer Third Class Akemi Jordan was pacing, reviewing the events of the past few days.

Things had not gone well when the SPECOPS Team had be mustered and outfitted to help deal with the situation. Mawked up would have been a better description. Bullets had not taken the monster down and it was only Halvert's shove that saved her life. That shove had sent her her sprawling through the hatch that closed off the section while the rest of the team were on the other side. She had tried getting back to them, pounding on the steel.

Someone had pulled her away and stuck her with a needle to sedate her. Later she heard that same dumbgrap Medtech had a broken collar bone from her smashing the butt of her SMG into it before she slumped against the bulkhead.

Now, in the darkness, she really wanted a drink. They were in deep grap and knew it.

The emergency battle lighting, red luminescent strips that required minimal battery power barely gave the compartment enough illumination to see. But it was better than pitch blackness. Everyone was scared and uncertain. Auxiliary power was barely covering life support, but the ship's temperature was dropping slowly. The morbid bet was which end was coming, starvation or freezing to death. More than one though it better to take their mawkin' chances against the beast instead, at lest death that way would be quick. She muttered, "Wonder if the grap thing sleeps. Shove some plastic explosive in its snoring mouth and mawkin' boom."

Akemi knew that if they were really making wishes, there was much better things to wish for. But some payback was certainly nice to think about.

She crouched down on her haunches near Joy Jackson. The older woman was a bit odd like most squints, but good with people. Doctor Locke was recognizing that those few "chosen" were the ones to help get them out of the grap if anyone could. She was not sure how she was going to do that herself, but Akemi thought the man had something by tagging Joy to help out. The lady was good at talking down the crazies.

"Hey, Joy. Locke said anything about getting power back on-line?"

It had been a bit of a blur, really. The entire evacuation process had been a total cluster- but that wasn't really unexpected. Joy had tried to stay out of the way as much as possible- she had been locked into her shared cabin, going over some new footage from the last few days before boarding. During the brief jaunt through hyperspace, she had tried to sleep- but the there was just too much noise; it was like trying to sleep in unfamiliar jungle- none of the sounds were quite words, but her brain kept working with them, trying to understand. She wasn't quite sure how she had ended up in the engineering spaces with the others, but when that fool Thompson tampered with the drive unit, and that THING showed up...

She was one of the first people out the door then- she knew a predator when she saw one. She hadn't agreed with Locke's decision, but it was his call, and it had saved at least some of them... She had tried to scavenge as much as she could over the intervening days- they only had a fraction of the initial population now, but they also had a significantly reduced area of the ark to work with, and a lot of the remaining space hadn't been intended as living quarters. Locke had co-opted most of the remaining folk with scientific expertise, especially any kind of engineering or mechanical experience, but Joy had been left to her own devices. While the de facto captain had said that he was trying to get the power systems back on line, Joy had the unsettling hunch that he was building a cadre to advise and control the remaining populace, something unsettlingly like a priesthood... At least the unsettling unearthly voices and other sounds had faded, now that the hyperspace drive had been destroyed.

She had scavenged a bunch of batteries, and had spent most of the last few days indulging herself, going over the direct and surveillance footage of the THING that Thompson had unleashed. Perched on table like a leopard on a branch, wrapped in her heaviest ballistic weave exploration clothing for warmth, she was entirely rapt in the glow of her IPAD X screen, editing and condensing the footage of that creature. Was it still prowling the closed sections of the ship? Was there anyone alive over there? And given how brutally dangerous it seemed to be, what could they do if it broke out of their containment?

"Hey, Joy. Locke said anything about getting power back on-line?"

At first, she didn't seem to hear the other woman's query. She stared at her screen for another moment- then with a shake of her head she closed the screen with the edited footage and set the unit down. Her voice, when she spoke, was warm and welcoming, even more than it had been. "I don't know quite what he has been up to- he has been spending all his time with his 'inner circle'. I suppose they COULD be trying to get the systems back on-line. From what I've heard they had a couple of hurdles to get over- something, either during hyperspace or because of whatever happened with the drive, messed up some of the control systems. Like an EMP, but no kind of energy we could measure or recognize... That, and some of the critical linkages are on the other side of the barricades, and we've few volunteers who want to go in there, even if we dared to open a hatch." Despite her rather dire pronouncements, she didn't sound worried, and her voice was somehow reassuring.

"I've been trying to go over what little we know about that THING. If we do need to get back into the secured space, we have to assume it is still there, and we'll have to deal with it. You're military, right? What kind of resources do we have left, if we have to go in there?"

Juno nodded.

"Lets go. Lets watch for signals...when we get closer we might get handset signals that are too weak to get to the Ark. And infrared on the back central area. We might be able to tell if the reactors are still online if there's a lot of heat."

"Good idea." Airman Babington agrees with Juno. "I'm ready to go when you all are." He readied his pistol, adjusted his body armor one last time, and nodded to the rest of the team while hoping that they couldn't hear his heart beating so hard in his chest.

Akemi Jordan

Akemi nodded at the question about her background. Though, she had to wonder if there really was a Military anymore. The chain of command was gone, at least temporarily.

“Yeah, I am.”

“We had not really been issued full tactical gear, at least most of the security personnel had not.”

“But my team is not most personnel and Sanchez had us grab it all. But we don’t normally carry around explosives or rocket launchers and did not deploy with them. If the rest of my team was able to handle that thing with 5.7mm ammo, then we would not be having this conversation. That’s all I have besides a mawkin’ kaybar.”

“If we have to go back in there, we need something more unconventional. Do you think anyone has full schematics loaded on their pads? Maybe we can find an alternate way to get around in there and set a trap or get the beast cornered better.”