World Tree MUSH

    It's been about twenty four hours since docking aboard the Nijiura space station and being chased through the stifling corridors by monstrous tentacular foes and the undead alike. Any rest has been poor, and further attack linger as a constant and unseen threat. Things have been quiet for now, but even the slightest clank and clatter in the darkness of the station are a warning threat of the things that crawl in the gloom. It's not too long of a wait after getting some rest in, though, that Alty comes in over the radio system.
    "Um. Are you guys awake yet? I know you probably didn't get much rest, but it's time again. Something needs fixed, and it's going to have to be done soon." She says gently. "The problems are the communications array and the automatic asteroid defense systems. They're both in Engineering, but I've got bad news. The station only has enough power to keep one running at a time... If you want to fix the comms array, you can still use the ateroid defenses, but you would have to control them manually."

  The bottlenose dolphin of the group volunteered to keep watch plenty enough, since poor visibility doesn't matter to his senses. It's also kept him busy and not thinking about whatever nightmare creature is wandering the station, or the horrors they'd seen in dead men walking.

  Ecco comes back to his senses with a buzzing sound, eyes opening. He'd been floating in places, one eye closed, the other staring blankly, arcing up into the air every few seconds -- his unconscious brain sending him to the surface to take a breath, the primal parts of his brain still assuming him to be in water.

  He shakes his head a little, a gesture perhaps unsettlingly human, and cocks his head, jaw hanging open to indicate he's listening harder.

  That lower jaw swivels from side to side in thoughtful gesture.

  "Assssteroid defense. What kind of impact are we talking, Alt-t-ty? If there'ssss not much of it... I can operate the defense plat-tform. If the otherssss agree," Ecco adds, cocking his head and eyeing the others. "Besidessss, I wouldn't be much help in fixing things. My knowledge is only bassssic." He claps his jaw in (loud) affirmative gesture, pulling himself into high stance in his excitement, head tilting down to eye the others. "I could control them manually. Everyone knows dolphinssss are the best operators in my world, because we already think in three dimensions. What do you guys think-k...? If you have a better idea, I'm fine with that-t, too..."

    Cayde hasn't been much for sleep. At least Exos can get by with less rest than humans, and he'd put that extra anxious energy to use scouting about, making sure nothing was creeping around the corner. They'd fixed one problem, but apparently that wasn't the solution for the walking dead back in medical. And they still had other things to take care of...

    "Heya Alty, how you holding up?" the Hunter Vanguard responds, glancing around at the others. "Yeah, haven't forgotten about that. What happened with the power? Something else gut that?" 

    Seems there's no helping that without wasting more time. Maybe they could figure it out or throw something together once they got to Engineering. "I'm thinking defenses are our best bet. If we're not here to comm anyone then there's no point to it," Cayde says, nodding at Ecco. Not that he's so sure about the operators thing but hey. Who's he to argue with a fish?

    Jessica was awake! After meeting up with everyone, she was in a relatively fresh state, but looked worried. Why? Well, the catgirl's ears perk up at the news, but she doesn't look up at first, and sighs. A loud click rises from her pistol and she adjusts her combat vest. "I only have two magazines worth of ammunition left. It's so expensive..." she mumbles. As the others who know firearms have probably figured out by now, Jessica's guns don't use gunpowder, but something very different.

    "Eh...? Um..." She blushes. "I-I'm qualified for more than pistols but I don't know if I could use a station's guns..." Stammering in worry. "But I really don't know anything about comms at all..." Then she looks at Ecco in surprise. "Maybe..."

A shadow coalesces to form Serrah with her arm in a sling, grunting as she does so. "Mrgrgr ... okay, confirmed, this hurts more when I switch between forms," she mutters. "No being a cat for now, either." She also did a little bit of watching, being that tiredness seems to be a bit less of a factor for her, too.

She looks between Ecco and Cayde. "I'm not that great at fixing things, either, but I can follow directions, and I could help with the defenses, given how fast vampires are," she says. Then she glances down at her arm. "... as long as it doesn't need both arms. Fuck, this is gonna be trouble. Uhh ..." She laughs helplessly. "Yeah, I don't have any other ideas of my own. Damn it ..."

    "I've been better." The control room-bound Shinki replies to the Hunter. "I've got plenty of power in here to keep me charged though so I'm not going anywhere. It's my job to be your eyes, so..." She says before pausing.
    "Alright, if you're not going to deal with the communications... Um-- From what I'm reading, the controls for the defenses are so easy almost anyone can use them." She does note, keying a button to unlock the door to Engineering. The blast doors hiss open with a slow hum, leading into a dark hall, illuminated only by red emergency lighting. "We're talking big impacts though, it looks like one happened just before we got here and took out the power connectors that would have supplied enough energy for both systems... A-anyway good luck."
    Once again it's off into the darkness.

  "'Anyone' as in, 'anyone who doesn't necessarily have human hands?'" In spite of the situation, there's no mistaking the resigned sarcasm in Ecco's voice. "I'm sure I can figure it out with everyone's help. As long as I can use the sensor equipment, we're in business."

  He turns, eyeing the closest doorway...

  ...and siiiighs, a sad warbling hiss of air. Everything loses the effect in air. That would have been a nice indignant jet of bubbles at having to go venture into the dark terrifying space station full of horrors again.

  "All right-t, I guess that means we gotta go back in. Ugh." His jaw swings sideways, thoughtful. "How do we get-t down to the defense platform, Alt-ty...?"

    "Ah, it'll be like shooting fish in a barrel! -er, no offense," Cayde adds hesitantly after glancing from Jessica to Ecco. He turns towards Serrah when she reappears/reforms, eyes flicking towards her arm. "We're pretty much all playing by ear and hey! We got this far. We've got this. Go team!" Adding a pump of a fist in the air, he looks around to see if he's gotten any better at motivational speaking before letting his hand drop.

    "With Alty opening the doors, the Exo nods, starting towards the newly open passage. Emergency lighting always was a mood setter.

    "Oh, well then. I guess we'd better make sure the rest of those meteors don't touch us." He starts ahead, weapon in hand. Can never be too careful!

    Two magazines will have to do, Jessica decides. She advances up with Cayde, looking at Serrah worriedly. "Will you be all right for now?" She isn't expecting the vampire to fight with them if she's injured, so taking point with Cayde makes sense.

    As she pulls out a little flashlight and scouts forward, she tries to cheer up Ecco. "Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll have some kind of dolphin interface. I've seen stuff like that back home... even though we didn't have dolphins quite like you."

Serrah chortles at Cayde's rejoinder. "Yeah, okay," she says. She doesn't sound that confident, but she's obviously nowhere near rock bottom. She simply starts sauntering into the darkness right behind Cayde and Jessica, without concern for things like "lighting level" or "the fact that her arm is broken", but she does pause to look up in the general direction of Alty's voice at Ecco's question.

She looks at Jessica, and shrugs. "Not much we can do about it," she says. "If we're lucky, healing time is 'hours' instead of 'days'. But ... eh. I'll be fine. If we make it out of here alive," she adds uneasily.

    "Just follow the doors I open for you." Alty replies gently. "Just um. Let me know if anything is in the way and I'll try to find an alternate path." Indeed, she starts opening a series of doors in the dark. It's not quite a straight shot to the defense platform, but rather a zig-zagging course through rooms full of pipes and cabling, and cramped halls that the public was never meant to see.
    It's only when one door opens that anyone walking-- or floating towards it might get an eerie sensation. Like nails on the chalkboard of the brain, a scratching sensation on the mind itself, and what clearly must be an auditory hallucination... Just a whisper.
    Join us in the depths...

  "None taken." Ecco swings his jaw around to Cayde, eyeing the Exo. He's silent for a few seconds after the whole pep talk thing. The dolphin shakes his head and flutes another sigh, flukes drooping a little. "...I'm still not-t a fish... why on Earth do people keep making that-t basic misssstake?"

  Shaking himself, he twists, darting agilely after Cayde with a kick of his tail, head turning to regard the Exo in motion. The dolphin keeps up without much apparent effort. "I figure between the group of ussss, we're bound to hit ssssomething."

  A slight twist of his head lets him focus on Jessica as he drifts along, occasionally kicking his tail to match Cayde's pace. "Doubt it-t. I could try to see if my harnessss will interface, but I'd need advanced surgery to have a neural jack-k-k. Hey, I should talk to Athena about that-t," he adds, to himself. Dolphins like him? "Tursopssss amicussss," he states, with a puff of pride. "The friendly bottlenosssse. Not all of our genes come from the common bottlenose dolphin," Ecco adds, "but a lot-t of mine do."

  Serrah earns a look next. It's hard to estimate what he might be thinking, though, with those inhuman eyes. Whatever he's thinking isn't revealed, either; he doesn't say anything before turning and setting after Cayde to catch up.

  Despite his bulk, he clears the zig-zagging hallways beautifully, occasionally dropping his guard enough to roll through the turns and drift upside-down beside Cayde, minute turns of his flippers steering him. That, and whatever arcane witchcraft powers that high-tech harness over his torso.

  ...And then he stops, pulling himself starkly upright in the middle of the hallway; where someone might well crash into him from behind. It's with an upward-trailing 'eeeeeeEEEEEE' of alarm that he does, presumably as he hears that sound...

    Okay, that's... creepy? As Jessica advances, taking turns covering for and being covered by the others, speaking quietly. "W-well there are Ancients like me that are based on dolphins, maybe..." She stops and those cat ears perk up, turning one wan and another before she bites her lip. "Um... hey um... d-does anyone else hear that?"

    Well, the dolphin squeal probably answers that! Jessica's tail stands straight up, poofing out, but despite the obvious twitchiness and panicky nature of the young mercenary, she maintains tight trigger discipine and doesn't even move her gun from its upright position. "I-I guesss so!"

    Peek down the corridor, then. She might need someone to nudge her to go further.

    It's okay Serrah, Cayde's got enough confidence for the whole party. Mostly because the alternative won't be fun. He may seem eager to be first down the creepy tunnels, but he's still on his guard as they go.

    "Sorry, yeah- just funnin'," he says absently Ecco-wards. "Most I've seen of Earth sealife is from old books and vids." It still tickles him having a sea mammal along as one of their party, not that the dolphin hasn't been an effective member, of course. Don't mess with fish. And not-fish.

    The Exo stops about the same time Ecco does, optics narrowing- and while it's not the creepy whispers at the back of his mind that startle him, that dolphin shriek sure does the trick. He jumps and then scowls, but at least it helps distract him for the moment.

    "There's still that," he does note, assuming the others are also hearing it and it's not just him going crazy. "Hey Alty, anything else weird coming up on the grid? We still got this creepy voice thing somehow linked to the zombies and it is damn unsettling."

Serrah glances back at Ecco. "What?" she says, almost defensively. Several possibilities are going through her mind, and none of them are good because all of them are related to her being a vampire.

It's not long before she starts hovering above the ground as they go through the hallways. She hardly even slows down as the 'voice' speaks up. "Oh right, that thing," she says distractedly. In a flicker of timestop-skipping, she's suddenly holding a baseball, and her sports bag is one baseball lighter. Yeah she's clearly proceeding as if she wasn't injured, to the best of her ability. She floats up right behind Jessica, peeking down the corridor over her head. "Hmph ..."

    "U-um!" There's clearly an issue.
    "W-well that's certainly a shorter path to the defenses." She answers Cayde, but it's clear she's hearing Ecco an Jessica's audible unease through the radio and it's making her more uneasy as a result. 
    And for good reason.
    "I um. I didn't open that door."
    "--I mean if you really want to go through there, it's a straight shot, but there's no power so it'll be pitch bla-"
    Alty doesn't get to finish that sentance. She, instead, tries to veer into a sharp "Look ou--!" But it's too late as something long and sinuous lashes out from the door, darting past Cayde and Ecco as it slithers faster than lightning and coils around Jessica's leg.
    It pulls with jarring force, yanking her clean off her feet as it starts to quickly pull her into the room, several glowing blue eyes opening on the appendage almost tauntingly as it starts to yank her into the darkness.

  Fortunately for the others, most of Ecco's creeped-out shriek is above the range of most humanoid hearing. It'd be alarm klaxons to one of his own kind, though!

  He stays in upright posture, because it's easy to snap himself into a charge from a stance like this. Also, because he's not actually calm at all, head pointing this way and that, jaw swinging all over the place in an effort to listen for more of the creepy voice. Or signs of whatever lies in the shadows.

  There's enough time for him to glance at Serrah again, blandly. "I think-k we should limit our focus to one disaster at-t a time. Getting all morbid isn't-t going to help anyone." And right now, the current disaster has become 'dead people, again, maybe.'

  "Are there more dead people in there?" Ecco swings his nose toward the darkness, resisting the urge to shudder. "That'ssss when we heard it-t last-t time..." Clicking, clicking; the dolphin aims his sonar into the darkness, to see if there's any signs of life. Or unlife.

  No sooner does he perceive something uncoiling out of that darkness than Ecco is moving, twisting and reeling off to one side with a squeal of alarm. "Oh, not-t again!" He loops around and dashes for the tentacle as it wraps around Jessica's leg, retaliating by attempting to sink his teeth into the thing. "Let-t-t her go...!" The beauty of it is, he doesn't talk with his jaws; he can totally bite down on something while taunting it!

  Ecco makes an effort to bite down as hard as he can. "...Can we burn this place when we're done here?" he wails, plaintively, voice warbling in exasperation and distress.

    Jessica twitches, her ear turning again to listen to the speaker tucked in her hair. "What do you mean you didn't open the door?" She asks, now sounding more worried and slowly lowering her pistol into a more ready position for combat.

    Just a little too late!

    "KYAAAAAAHHHH!" If she'd known it was coming, perhaps things would have worked out differently, but the pistol rattles heavily on the floor and skids toward the wall while Jessica goes the opposite direction, slamming into the floor and yanked right across! The only thing that saves her from completely vanishing into the darkness is quick, catlike reflexes grabbing onto the seam of a deckplate, clinging there while kicking her free leg. "HELP!"

    Technically Cayde's been dead, several times over. Naturally he'd prefer this side of company than whatever's nattering in their heads. Sundance shouts a warning internally that overlaps with Alty's, and Cayde's yanked his hand cannon up but pulls short of firing as Jessica gets grabbed and Ecco dives in to make use of those killer chompers. They've been super effective so far, at least!

    "Ecco, I am all for burning this place out."

    He leaps forward between the others and towards the open door, firing into the darkness, using the glowing eyes to figure where his targets should be.

Serrah sighs. "Yeah, yeah," she says, slumping slightly at Ecco's words.

Her response to the tentacle, however, is much more straightforward. "Oh no you --" One timestop later, there's a whole bunch of baseballs rocketing towards the eyes, and Serrah is halfway into the room, one foot moving to stomp down on the tentacle at superhuman speeds. (In fact, the stomp-attempt is what pulled her out of her timestop; she can't do melee while time is stopped.) "Thirded!" she calls back to Cayde and Ecco.

    Surprise predators work best when their prey is unexpecting and helpless. They do not perform as well when given a fight in return for their attack, and the tentacle does not hold on for long when assaulted so viciously in retaliation for trying to make off with Jessica like that.
    Ecco is once again rewarded with the taste of wet rot for his troubles, while baseballs and bullets pelt the eyes, earning a shrill sound of pain something akin to whalesong as the tentacle releases Jessica's ankle and lashes back into the darkness, given one last stomp for its efforts on the way out.
    This is when another door opens on the other side of the room.
    "Now, now, go now!" Alty says sharply over the radio.

  Well, if it was a choice between dead people and a colossal squid-thing, Ecco is going to pick the squid-thing every day of the week. Those dead people walking were incredibly, unsettlingly creepy and they weren't even his own species. He settles for trying to keep the squid-thing's attention, namely by making every attempt to ride the riptide of those flailing tentacles... and to try and rip them apart with his teeth.

  The whole thing tastes like disgusting and rubber.

  "Good!" Ecco throws back at Cayde. "I don't-t think anybody's going to miss this place!"

  He will conveniently ignore how fast Serrah seems to be skipping around the place. It just sort of slides sideways out of his brain because his brain's been subject to enough weird already today. Hard no. Pool's closed; go home.

  "UGHHHH this thing tastes like it'ssss already rotten," the dolphin complains, clapping his jaws and narrowly missing the flailing tentacle. "Are these ssssquid-things dead, to? OH IFNI, IS THISSSS A SSSSQUID-ZOMBIE!?"

  Focus, Ecco. Focus!

  Whalesong is met by angry squealing. Fortunately, most of it is not actually audible to the current party, but it may annoy the invertebrate trying to find new and creative ways to chomp down on them. Ecco needs no second encouragement as the door whisks open. He's already attempting to lead the charge with a thrashing of those powerful tail flukes.

    Jessica is wasting no time scampering away from the door, not even wasting breath with a thanks yet. After grabbing her pistol(that is her only defense right now), she's hurrying to move with the others toward the opening door, and is moving... pretty fast actually. She's not really superhuman, but you don't join a worldwide PMC without having some level of fitness.

    "Thanks," she finally manages to squeak in the next room, getting her bearings and sweeping the entire area with a quick once-over, now maaaaybe a little trigger-happy compared to normal. "Why can't they be slow-moving normal zombies!"

    Cayde continues to lay down some cover fire as Alty provides them another path of egress. Three votes to burn the place down- he's feeling good about this. Although if they didn't get to that control room then they wouldn't have to worry about figuring out how to do it when the whole place would get cratered soon.

    "Normally we don't go chewing on the undead things because that just seems to be counterproductive," he quips, dashing after the others. Them's the breaks when you attack with your mouth, he supposes. "Still not sure what sort of zombies we're dealing with, other than that something wants inside our heads." 

    He casts a look back towards the corridor they'd come from, perhaps toying for a hot second with the idea of actually just trying to see if that other door wouldn't reveal that secret. Not without a mess of course...

"Right, uh ..." Serrah just nods. Okay, good, Jessica's getting out on her own just fine. One more timestop later, and she's sauntering into the escape route with her baseballs back in her sports bag; she breaks into a slightly-superhuman run almost immediately, though.

She doesn't even stop to catch her breath (because she doesn't have any). "There's all kinds of zombies, Jess," she says. Then she belatedly realizes that weird thing about how different worlds don't have the same kind of nonhumans in them. "... although, uh. I dunno what kind of ... creatures ... they'd have here." She shakes her head, and jerks a thumb back towards the darkness they just escaped from. "That asshole didn't seem to be based on any specific kind of living creature, though."

    "I really don't want to think about how many possible kinds of zombies there are, Serrah!" Alty says over the comms as the group moves. The door leads into hall and is promptly slammed shut behind them, but just beyond said hall, the next door opens... To a view of space. Stars shimmer in the night, illuminating the defense platform, and showing four large double turrets on the upper part of the station.
    Each of those turrets seems to be linked to chair, each with a pair of twin joysticks with triggers. ... Or for those lacking hands, a neural band of some kind that seems to go on the head. Alty did say it looked like anyone could use them. And they're going to have to be put to use fast considering the storm of rocks floating through space towards the planet and the station.

  "One kind is t-too many!" Ecco squawks, in response to Serrah's pondering on how many kinds of zombies could be here. "One is way t-too many!"

  The dolphin streaks down the hallway, not even bothering to pause as the door whisks shut behind them. And then he pulls himself stark vertical at the sudden sight of stars. That was unexpected. Squee--!? Oh, it's an observation dome. Ecco eases back down to horizontal posture, eyeing the operators' chairs dubiously.

  While he can understand the function of these things, actually operating them... well. Maybe that neural band will work. Maybe it'll just make him hear voices.

  He eyes the band, and then eyes the cold, serene stars, which are going to murder all of them if they don't man up and do this thing. Questions of relative safety won't matter if they're dead. Ecco kicks his tail and doubles back on himself, drifting beside a table where a band hangs.

  "Hey, ssssomeone help me get-t one of these things on. Quick-k!"

    Finally, something Jessica can feel confident doing! "I'm not sure how these work, but I know I can aim at least!" The catgirl holsters her pistol quickly, moving to one of the chairs that doesn't have a neural band to leave that open for others, and then cracks her knuckles to see if there's a quick reference for using this stuff.

    "Okay, umm... don't forget to take a few practice shots so you know how much you need to lead the target!" She's not worried about Cayde, at least, since the Exo seems to know his way around firearms, but Serrah and Ecco may not have much experience with actual firearms.

    Reaching over, she holds up the neural band for Ecco, too. "Here, I've got it."

    Okay, not even creepy mental space zombies can spoil his mood as he sees what kind of a setup the station has for defense. Cayde tucks his gun back into its holster just to free up his hands so he can rub them together with glee. 

    "Well look at this! Wonder what kind of firepower we got here," he says as he slides into a chair, fingers wiggling tantalizingly over the joysticks. "Saddle up, people. Looks like we're just going to have to dive right in." Like they haven't been already. 

    "Sundance, start working on the communications array, and if you can somehow reroute energy from non-essential areas of the station, like say...the medbay? See if that'll help us get some extra juice." The Ghost materializes outside of her Guardian and gives a curt nod before floating over towards the main console and vanishing in the same shimmer of light.

Serrah winces slightly. "Sorry, sorry ... oh, shit." She frowns at the view they're getting of space in front of them. "Looks like we got here just in time!"

She glances at Jessica as she goes to help Ecco, and gingerly sits into one of the neural-band seats, wincing slightly as she puts it on with her good hand. "Okay, let's see, uh ..." Taking Jessica's advice, she fires a few shots this way and that, then blasts a single asteroid -- though it does take a couple of misses before she hits it head on.

Her body twitches. "... Nope, doesn't work at all while time is stopped," she says wryly. "Not a surprise, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try."

    It's a pretty simple system indeed. The joysticks swivel the turrets left and right, up and down, and a pull of the trigger launches a pair of rocket propelled charges that deonate on impact. The neural bands take a little more time toe figure out than that, but are equally just as simple once donned, allowing an injured person like Serrah, or someone lacking hands, like Ecco, control a turret as well. Which is all well and good because all four turrets are going to be needed to take out the oncoming storm.
    "--That's a good idea." Alty pipes up from her control room as Sundance starts to work the consoles. It shouldn't be too hard for the Ghost to reroute power from Medical to the comms array, and there are a few other places that she should be able to siphon power from as well.
    All that's left to do is to start busting up asteroids, because they are getting closer.

  "Thankssss, Jessica."

  Squirming a little to get the curve of his forehead mashed into the contour of the headband, Ecco blinks and looks out the dome to the stars beyond, absently noting Serrah making short work of an asteroid. His head moves minutely; the muzzle of his turret swings around to mirror the movement.

  Ecco claps his jaw in glee. "You guyssss all set-t?"

  His head flicks a little up, and the turret raises to mirror him. A series of clicking noises appear to be 'contemplative noises as Ecco figures out how to fire the turret with the neural band.' Evidently he hits on the solution, because after a few seconds of that, the muzzle lights up and starts shredding asteroids.

  "That'ssss more like it-t!" Ecco crows. "C'mon, guyssss!"

  He might be enjoying this part a little too much. A means to work off that fear, maybe. Something tangible to punch! Proverbially. With lasers. Also, technology he can actually use, which is always kind of nice.

    Jessica is... not exactly in her element, but seems to have a strange knack for shooting things that are moving toward her and trying to reach a specified point. She quickly falls into a rapid movement of blasting things in the defense of her gun emplacement's tower.

    Ecco's chittering gets her back to paying attention there. "We don't know how much power we can draw, so try to pick your shots!" Just a word of warning, they may not be short but... better safe than sorry.

    "Blowing things up is so therapeutic," Cayde grins, swinging around with his own turret to fire at the oncoming asteroids, and he does so with reckless abandon. At least there's no worries about what else they can possibly hit out there- unless another ship came in. Pity they didn't get a schedule of any other expected tours.

    Meanwhile Sundance works her space magic, fielding power from parts of the station that can be spared, trying to manage it between the defense systems and the comm array. As soon as she can get it functional, she boots that up so they'll have a signal to warn any inbound ships about the station's current situation.

Serrah smirks faintly at Ecco's enthusiasm. "I couldn't'a put it better myself!" she says, her New Yorker accent briefly shining through.

"Got it, Jessica!" Unlike Cayde and Ecco, though, she's more-or-less following Jessica's advice, but in a different way. She's being more cautious, picking her shots carefully, firing in quick bursts only at the perfect moment. (This is because vampires are ambush predators, and hiding until they could strike is how they would have hunted in the ancestral environment. Avoiding being seen by the asteroids is a non-issue, though.)

    It's a nice little bit of catharsis isn't it? After spending what is, already, too long on a derelict space station, getting to sit down and blast asteroids as they come sailing towards the station is easy compared to dealing with the horrors of the station's darkness.
    With Sundance working on the main systems, it's not long at all before other sections of the station go dark and the communications systems soon go green light. The meteor shower continues for some time, for the most part the larger ones are broken down by the group, a few small fragments pelt the station's armored hull, but it's not enough to cause severe damage, and after one particularly large asteroid that the group has to focus their fire on collectively, it seems to come to an end, with a particularly dozy yawn from Alty over the radio.

    A little desperation in hammering the trigger to blast that final meteor maybe, then the plinking storm of pebbles that rains down and makes Jessica wince. The battle-kitty slumps, back to her mumbling and meek self now, and runs a hand through her hair. "Okay, I think that's the worst? Um, how is the comms going? I really want to get out of here."

    Not a lot of scientific curiosity about the unliving monstrosities, no.

    His thumbs a blur as the larger space rock comes hurtling towards them, Cayde lets out a whoop when it explodes into space dust, throwing both fists in the air in your standard pose of victory before he remembers that there might be more to worry about in its wake. Thankfully that seem to be it for surprises, at least when it comes to the meteor shower. With the last of them taken care of, the Exo leans back in his seat, folding his arms behind his head.

    "Nice work, team," he says, not about to object to having some time to relax. Sure, there are still undead things creepering around in the other wing, but they cleared a meteor shower. He calls that a win.

    "Comm array is up", Sundance reports. "Scanning for frequencies, transmitting station status." Two more problems Cayde ticks off his mental list. "Much as I'd like to get off this death trap, Jess, I think we're going to have to find a way back to the ship and fly out ourselves, unless there's another landing pad and a ship out there willing to risk it." He pauses, thinking about their initial adventure. "-also we need to regroup with Alty. Hey Sundance, see what all else you can dig up about this place while you're in there. Maybe we can figure out what's been happening before all...that stuff," he suggests, gesturing loosely in the direction of the doors.

  Not only is it easy to blast a bunch of space debris, it also requires relatively little thought in the grand scheme of things. Ecco is all too happy to indulge in this explodey catharsis.

  He's not a bad shot, either. He'd commented earlier that some of the best Terran pilots are dolphins, chiefly because they already think in three dimensions, and piloting is the next logical step.

  Shooting's not really a next logical step, but that's okay, Ecco's gonna run with it anyway. Because he likes not being smashed into by meteors. He's zinging coordinates and directions to the others because his neural band is hooking his brain right up to how the targeting systems 'see' the debris. Either way, he's a surprisingly efficient spotter when he's not shooting his own space junk down.

  It's not until after the biggest of them disintegrates that he's left looking around for more nonexistent targets.

  They're all gone.

  So's Alty.

  "Well," Ecco mumbles, "that-t wassss fun... hey, anybody, a little help, here?" He can't take the stupid neural band off, either.

Serrah lets out a growl as they have to put all of their efforts into a single larger asteroid, but she cheers as the it blows up; she doesn't even seem to register the patter of detritus against the station's armor.

And then she promptly exhales with relief and takes off the neural band. "Yeah, really," she says.

She hops off and floats over to help Ecco with his neural band. "I was gonna say, like. Adding onto Jessica's, uh, remarks ... we should figure out how to get through the door to the ship we came in here on, and then see about, y'know." She gestures vaguely with her good hand. "Blasting this damn station into small enough smithereens that we don't have some weird undead voice tryin' to mess with our heads."

She hesitates as Cayde mentions 'before all this stuff'. "... and make sure whatever caused it doesn't follow us," she adds flatly.

    That's it. Asteroids are dealt with, the communications system is back online and Sundance is handily transmitting the station's status to anyone that could be nearby. It's as good as a call for rescue. Or at least it should keep curious spacers away from adding more gas to the burning wreck that is the Nijiura.
    But then Alty yyyyawwwns again. "--... Huh?"
    Something seems to be amiss.
    "A-ah... Oh my alarm didn't go off. ... My alarm didn't go off! Everyone! Quick, you need to get to the asteroid defense- ... platform?" She trails clean off.
    "What are you all doing there already? I just woke up."

    Wiping her brow, Jessica spins in her chair to help Ecco, only to see the dolphin is already being helped. "Yeah, I want off this can... of..." She trails off when Alty seems to wake up and be very confused by short term memory loss.

    Blink blink. Ears wilt and she whispers, "I think we'd better go check on her."

    "......"

    Cayde squints a bit at the stars as Alty speaks up again. Squints real hard. As though they hold the secrets of the universe, or at least some clue as to what the hell is going on in this station. He slowly casts a look between the others then, although stubbornly maintaining a relaxed appearance despite the concerning response from their unseen friend. And finally, although not sounding the least bit convinced:

    "Well! I'm sure everything's fine." 

Serrah looks up sharply as Alty suddenly sounds alarmed. Is there something they're missing --?

She stares blankly as she registers precisely what Alty is saying. And then, slowly and ponderously with her free hand, she facepalms.

... And then Cayde says that, and she jerks the hand in the sling with the apparent intention of adding it to the facepalm, but grunts with pain instead and quickly relaxes that arm.