Originally from http://aw3d.weebly.com/environment---orbital-tram---inspired-by-ea-viscerals-dead-space.html
Gather information phase
Arthur goes to investigate the logs at his terminal in the repair shop.
Partial success
Apparently the alarm system in the sleep sectors was triggered by some biological invasive bacteria in the air. This was 10 minutes ago, when the compad had started blaring.
He misses this and thinks it’s a false alarm from a hardware breakdown instead.
“Blasted rust can”, he mutters to himself as he prepares his tools pack.
“The alarm must have went off when some hardware breakdown happened”, he thinks. “It’s this entire place coming apart from the lack of proper parts”
He gets up and heads to the section lock. He has prepared an oxygen mask and a small tank. The life support system had also been taken offline, in order to not waste energy when nobody was there.
He misses that this life support system had itself had been the one detecting the chemical threat and triggered the system shutdown to avoid wasting of energy from what it now deemed an “unsalvageable” sector.
Arthur recollects that about two days ago there had been a breakout of a rash from a now offline section of the ship. A group of scrapers had been sent into sector, Agriculture-2, to gather up anything that could be scrounged. It had been taken offline as “deprioritized”. They had come out with rashes all over their bodies. He didn’t make anything of it back then. But now?
He thinks to drop by the clinic where these people had been brought.
Is the doctor there to answer questions? Fate check: Exc No
He walks into the empty clinic.
“Dr Forler?”
Nobody. The clinic is empty. Clean, orderly, but empty.
“Odd”, he thinks. “Guess they were fine and just left.”
Info
The rash actually dies out after the initial symptoms. It will then return in 24 hours, far more virulent. Lethal. So the patients left because these initial symptoms had cleared.
Do I decide to ask their families/other people about the patients?
1d6 (1) =
1Nope.
Arthur gets his equipment knowing he will need a lot of it to fix the life support system and power cycle the section.
Load = Heavy
CUT TO - Flashback: When he puts the jacket on Samantha in the rec room, he also asks her about anything she’s noticed about the sick. She mentions that one of the room mates was complaining about “his rash coming back”. This was 1 hour ago.
Engagement roll (yaaasss finally!)
1, +1 bold +0 vul +1 contacts? Samantha knows something. -1 I don’t know the real thing
2dice 2d6kh1 (
4, 6) =6NIIICEEE!!I’m in a controlled position. I think this means that I manage to think about grabbing an oxygen mask. Mark 2 Load and have an extra oxygen tank.
Arthur notices that the system has stopped issuing alarms to his personal compad. They usually persist until you either mark the crisis as solved or… they go offline. The system must have been dead already for the past half hour. This means the oxygen could become a problem. He stops by the lab to take an extra oxygen tank for his breath kit.
He descends into the cold lifeless section. He traverses the empty space. Nothing, just the mess of people leaving in a hurry.
Arthur reaches the admin’s office.
Info
I use Hack with Fine tool.
4d6kh1 (4,
3,2,4) =4push gambit
expend SP Armor to avoid conseq
He fires up the terminal and boots his compad’s hacking suite. That was the only place he could easily hack into the terminal, due to elevated system network access. He could do it from the outside, but not as easily and not as inconspicuously. He had tried but couldn’t convince the station governor to grant him admin keys. Aaand done. A reverse rainbow lookup had granted him access to the local admin account. He was in.
But Arthur is clever to know that’s not enough: there are also logs. He checker there are no logs being sent to a central server about who’s logged in from where. He deletes them and doesn’t leave a trace.
Now… what happened to the system? He examines the video feeds.
Info
And now a study roll:
3d6kh1 (
2, 5,5) =5takes too long, runs out of oxygen from one tank
He sees the people returning from the doctor. He has the list of their names. He stops the feed and examines their rashes. They all look the same, fading. He jumps forward to the hours before the alarm. He sees the rashes returning, as Samantha had pointed out. They had now also extended to others. Who? Their close ones. It was the air! Air! The virus had spread through the air. The air filtration system must’ve crashed trying to analyze it.
Getting so caught up in studying the feeds, Arthur doesn’t notice he’s running low on oxygen in the first tank already. He does now and curses. “Must’ve been the elevated heart rate”, he thinks.
He needs to find the air filtration system and restart it manually. If it had crashed, he could manually patch it to ignore this virus for now. He shook his head in disbelief. This is what they had come to: ignoring air-borne viruses.
Info
Just to NOT make this about COVID, I will make it so that the virus is actually a sentient alien life form
Doing it is not the problem. It’s the getting there and getting out quickly enough.
Info
scramble 1d6 (3) =
3failure means I pass out as I am trying to get out after fixing the thing
He dashes through the sleep section, descends into the maintenance sub-level. He finds the life support central system. His breath is out of control.
He restarts the system and can hold himself awake while he’s trudging towards the section exit.
He collapses and tries to send a signal on his compad. He can barely hold his eyes open. Hands heavy. Lights out.
Info
1d6 (5) =
5I make it but have severe exhaustion level 3 trauma.
Arthur wakes up in a bed in the clinic. So much noise. First he thinks it’s the headache. Then he sees them: all the beds in the clinics are occupied by screaming, wailing people. He feels his lungs burn as he returns from a painful sleep.
“You were out, for 10 hours. Lucky she caught you”, Dr Forler says.
She turns around from her desk terminal.
“But you’re fine now, the sensors says”
She gives him a professional quick smile.
She turns around to continue filling the forms on her screen.
“Samantha is outside. You should leave and make space for the actual sick. This rash is all over”
Arthur looks around the internment ward.
All the 50 beds were full. The people were wrapped in cotton medical wraps and wailing. Some of them were bleeding from their wraps.
“What sort of rash is this?”, Arthur asks.
“I don’t know. I’m looking into it. Now, please leave.”
To continue with downtime