I breathed a sigh of relief as I walked into the tram control station. I spotted Daniels and Hammond waiting on the other side of the tram shaft at the control terminal for passenger intake. Both looked ready to shit themselves as Daniels kept trying to hack into the terminal, with Hammond not a foot behind her watching the doors and shaft for any sign of a Necro. When Daniels spotted the door I had just opened, and then me, she sighed in relief before sending me a video call.
"Scott! Thank god you survived," Daniels said with Hammond craning his neck around to see my armored face in Daniels' Holo comm. With slow steps, he walked backwards to keep up security for both him and Daniels.
"It's good to see you alive, Isaac," Hammond sighed as some tension left his shoulders before taking a breath and giving us a firm yet fearful look. "Please tell me one of you knows where these things have come from after digging into the logs back at the entrance." Daniels shook her head negatively, yet I could see the flash of hidden understanding of horror her eyes betrayed as she put together what she was told about the marker from her bosses.
"It's the crew, Hammond," I growled. "I was ambushed a few times before I got here, and... Hammond, they were wearing crew attire."
"The crew!?" Hammond said with shock as he fully turned to the holo screen, showing my face, and completely forgot to keep his guard up in the face of the devastating news. "So what, are you saying that some sort of biological weapon has been released into the ship or something?" he asked as his mind tried to come up with the most logical answer.
"I don't know, I didn't find anything in the logs, considering how quickly we were ambushed, but that might be the best guess we have for now," I answered with a head shake and cold reason. He sighed and just nodded with my agreement at his logic.
"The crew? How could some bio weapon do that to the crew?!" Daniels finally chimed in with heat at the news. I could tell it was genuine, as she had been told rumors about the marker's abilities, rather than a true debrief.
"It's the best theory we have for now, Daniels," Hammond said firmly before checking the doors and vents again after calming down. "We need to get to the bridge, it's secure enough that we're likely to find someone holding up." Daniels looked like she wanted to argue more, but the sound of a monstrous scream in the distance made her think better.
"Fine, fine, okay, hang on," she said before going over to the tram terminal. After a few seconds, though, she shook her head. "It's no good, the tram control is saying that it's damaged and out of order. We're going to need to replace it," she said, and Hammond gave her a grim look.
"Is that feasible?" he asked, and I was the one who answered.
"Yes, there should be a spare in case of damage to the tram," I said while fiddling with the screen on my end. While they were figuring out the tram, I was locating the rigs for every important person on the ship, in hopes of collecting them as I went to upgrade my clearance to access more supplies for this shit show of survival attempt. As I did, though, I found an anomaly that the security system was warning about. It was a blip, an unregistered living lifeform on the ship. One that didn't get scanned in like I just did with Hammond, Daniels, and Chen. Confused, I tried to access logs to get more details, wondering if the ship was registering a necro as an authorized person. If it were, I could get Daniels to code some sort of warning system for me to know when I was going to be ambushed.
Yet as I dug into what I was allowed to view, which wasn't much, given I was a guest of the ship, I froze solid. I managed to obtain just a few audio files that were flagged for security to view, given a rather aggressive attitude by the unauthorized individual towards the ship's automatic systems' request for registration. I played them on my private system in one of my ears as Hammond and Daniels chatted in my other ear about how to fix the system without my input. As the audio played, I heard the southern drawl and knew that no one still alive in the ship had it.
That in itself didn't make me freeze, though; no, it was the swearing of the hells. Of shoving her hellblade in the computers digital ass, and the quite muttering of finding a bitch that shoved her through a portal that made me start to piece together who was talking. I had binged every episode one late night during one of the many jobs I had to pay for my college. It was an indie show, something brought to the limelight with both haters and fanatics alike after its sister show got greenlit by Amazon for a first season.
"Millie, right?" I whispered to myself as the accent shifted through what I remembered of the show's characters. "Or was it Moxie?" I tried again, remembered the married duo.
"SCOTT!" shouted Hammond, and I looked up at my holo screen. Both Daniels and Hammond were staring at me with some confusion. "Are you okay? your mumbling to yourself." I shook my head and nodded.
"Yeah, fine, just getting the details downloaded onto my com. Look, I'm gonna head out so we can hopefully find someone alive, just keep safe, okay?" I said as I downloaded both the route to the tram maintenance room and also the last known location for the dimensional interloper. The good news for me was that she was heading toward me, or at least towards the flight deck, so hopefully I could catch her before she died, as I recalled her being a rather skilled assassin, yes, but not necro at every corner skilled.
"Right, okay, just be safe, we can't lose you to Scott," Hammond said.
"I will," I answered.
"And don't worry about Nichole, okay? She's smart, I'm sure she found somewhere to hide," Hammond said with a smile that didn't reach his eyes. I just nodded and watched them as he and Daniels slowly moved back to a more secure location than the tram stations' open area. Daniels just gave me a nod of concern before cutting the feed as they left my visual sight. With a sigh and now a time-sensitive mission, I checked my plasma cutter and moved to get my first upgrade, and hopefully some much-needed assistance going forward.
Yet when I went to the door to head down into the tram station cavern, I found it locked down. Annoyed and remembering that it should be open, I tried to find out why it wasn't. When I did, I felt my blood boil as it seemed, unlike the game, that the tram control station went into a sort of lockdown when the motherboard got fried. Some deeply coded safety feature in case of a runaway glitching tram. It was a good chance that Daniels hacked her way into the tram station with her superior skills. Skills I lacked, given my engineering background.
That meant I needed to get the replacement board before getting a much-needed stasis upgrade. This meant I needed to run that fucking dual leveled gauntlet of necro's to get the damn board. Taking a breath to calm down, I tried another option, which was to pull out wires like I did with the door down the last hallway. Yet I knew instinctively that I couldn't, as the wall around the door was reinforced to prevent that sort of thing. After all, can't have someone breaking in to sabotage the tram, given how important it was to get people to and from. Sighing, I just shook my head and turned to the other door. This one led down a hallway to a maintenance bay. With a roll of my shoulders, I firmed my grip on my plasma cutter and went the harder path first.
#####
With a hiss from the hydraulic system of the maintenance entry door, I was given a sight of a two-level open room with vents and hidden cracks and crevices. Truly a perfect environment for a necromorph surprise party. shaking my head, I didn't waste time and moved into the room slowly but steadily. Listening through the loud thumps of my metallic boots on the grated railing for even the faintest sounds of scraping, growling, or non-rhythmic thumping, I did my best to let my combat talent guide my budding tactical movement to find hidden threats. I couldn't trust games staged jump scares, given the few discrepancies I had already seen. So now I just had full-blown paranoia that my first level of stress defense kept me from going into insanity.
I knew what I had to do and where to get it done, which meant I didn't need to bumble around as I quickly located the elevator and made my way there. Which, of course, sparked the first blown-out vent and the sound of inhuman screams. I couldn't tell which vent, as the open room echoed the sound, but that didn't matter as I moved faster now that stealth was no longer an option for me. After all, the necrotic fucks were coming for me, so I got to play a more interactive four dimensional shooting gallery as I fired my first round into a necromorph that leapt down from the railing above. My first shot tore into the left leg as it fell from above, while the next two uselessly cut against its torso and thankfully took a blade arm from its body.
This caused the necro to drop in a sad landing that made its near-separated leg fully break off. This dazed it long enough for me to send a clean two shots to take its other arm blade and head from it. I didn't have time to enjoy the thing falling to the ground, too damaged to be a threat anymore, as I wheeled around from the growl that sprang up behind me. Two more necro were rushing me. I kept my head as I sent three rounds to take out the first's legs. This caused the two to stumble on each other, making the next three shots just clean up to make them too damaged to keep up the attack.
With a breath, I pulled my aim up high again as I spotted movement just at the top of my vision and fired my last few shots into the next necro leaping from above. With practiced grace from years of using the tool, thanks to technically being Isaac, I swapped out the dead charge pack and inserted a new one before the broken necro fell to my railing level. Not seeing another necro for a moment, I pushed forward, taking a moment to check the fallen enemies if they had a credit chip or ammo like in the game. Stupid, I know, but dreamers got to dream, you know? Getting justifiably jack shit from the action, I made it to the elevator to the upper level just as a few more vents broke apart.
What to know about a fun fact about being in the Dead Space game for real? Turns out open elevator lifts don't make for mini safe zones, as I found myself wasting another charge pack on four necro who tried to kill me while walking out of such a lift as I reached the second level. Still, I managed the best I could as I tactically walked to the power switching station that thankfully had bright blue and red cables leading to it. Turns out the power supply the ships use is not a game mechanic and really just well color coordinated. So with ease, I walked up to the breaker box for the area and made the easy choice of cutting power to the lights to open up the storage room.
No new necro showed up while I did, so I took the chance to check the lockers next to the breaker to thankfully pick up a few extra charge packs for my plasma cutter, and a fucking high grade dose of Stem Gel. What is Stem Gel? That is the actual brand name of a Med-pack from the game. Think Stem pack from Fallout, and add Sci fi nano bullshit on top of that. The three levels of Med-packs in the game? Levels of dosage in the actual world. It goes from consumer grade, high grade, and then medical grade levels of how much you're pumping into your system. To say having it was wonderful would be an understatement. With another heavy breath to help calm my resistant nerves, I pushed back out to go use the lift again in the nearly pitch black room.
"Is that a few more vents breaking open, I hear?" I say over the echoes screams of the new necro that have entered the room. "Yep, I did indeed," I said as I practically ran for the elevator, only to be bodily flung off the upper railing by a stabbing tackle that was delivered by a necro hanging off the fucking wall. Did I know that a normal necro could do that? NO! NO I DID NOT! With a grunt/scream, I managed to grab the blade arms before they sank into my chest as we started to fall. Without even taking a second to think, I shifted my airborne weight to bring the necro under me as we fell, hoping to break the fall at the bottom of this room with its body. Thankfully, though, we hit the lower railing and not the true bottom like I thought my luck would have given me, so following my combat talent's thinking, I quickly shoved off the necro till I was straddling it to blow off its blade limbs and head.
Still letting the talent lead me, I was quick to roll away from the now useless necro, just missing the three other necro leaping down to stab me to death. Using the moment of the roll, I shoved an arm out at the right time to end up in a one-knee to the ground stance. Without wasting a second, I fired over and over till the three were limbless and as dead as I could make them. Checking my charge, I found it at half charge and so pressed up with my only foot on the ground into a standing position again. Taking a moment, I checked where I landed, located the storage room, and then rushed in with a wider range of vigilance. Bringing down two more necro, I made it to the room and quickly shut myself inside, plasma cutter pointed to the only vent in the room.
It spun away noisily as I kept my gun on it as I walked over to the motherboard. Grabbing it, I shoved it away in a secure pocket on my lower back and then walked over to the shelving to grab what I could. Another Stem Gel, consumer grade, and a few more charge packs for my cutter. I finally grabbed the power node, not even thinking about the workbench in the corner given the fucking nightmare this room already was, and quickly left the room, no staged jump scare in sight. As the door opened, I switched back to the hallway and started forward when my sixth sense made me leap forward into a roll that left me on my side looking back the way I rolled from. Directly above the door, a necro had been primed to strike down at me, and just missed thanks to my budding sixth sense. With a few easy shots, I dropped it and quickly rose back up to my feet.
"Fuck, this is so much worse then the game" I whispered out for the second time since waking up in this world. Already turning I saw a few more necro down the hall ready to meet me, making me sigh and shoot my way back out of this fucking one room, and back to the damn tram station control.
#####
My breath grew heavier with each few feet as blood dripped off the metal floors from soaked cloth bandages. I tried to get another jolt of adrenaline, but my body was spent, and I was practically dead on my feet. I gritted my teeth when I stumbled to a knee after losing my balance, realizing the strain to stand was nearly impossible to overcome. Still, with willpower, I pushed back up and kept going. I had to, I couldn't let that bitch be right, couldn't let this ship be my grave.
"Left, right, left, right," I mumbled as I put one foot in front of the other. I twitched when I heard a vent spin faster to my left, making me tense my numb hold on my knife. When nothing came out of it, I kept moving on, still mumbling, still pushing for the next five feet to safety and rest. It was practically metitive as I kept whispering the next foot to move forward, to bring me forward. I lost track of the world around me, which I knew subconsciously wasn't good. Until I started to hear the sound of a repetitive hard thump over and over, which made the world come back into focus as I blinked away black spots and viewed that same cavern that I was walking in a moment ago.
The exception being the massive tram stuck on the line above, two doors, one up a ramp, and the other slamming away over and over in some sort of glitch, and finally, some futuristic armored guy standing by the glitching door, holding a severed arm. He was pulling something off of the damned thing before tossing the appendage. I just stared at the man, watching as he started fiddling with his arm, and trying to attach something to it. It wasn't until he talked that I realized I had a living, breathing person in front of me. Yes, he was likely a human, and he might not take kindly to me being a demon from hell, but the black spots were getting worse, and I didn't have the strength to put a knife to his throat and demand answers. So with a shuddering breath, I stepped forward and put on my most charming smile.
My footfalls caused enough echo in the quiet tunnel that the man, who had just finished attaching whatever it was to his armor, looked over and down at me. He didn't seem to be freaking out at my three foot, red skinned, dual horned, and near naked appearance, which was a good sign. Opening my mouth, I spoke as calmly as I could the first words to a man who would become my ride or die lover, Loyal champion, and pathway to getting my revenge on that bitch who took everything from me.
"Hey stranger, care to help a woman out of this hellhole?" I asked before the ground started to get closer to my face a little too fast for my taste. Later, when we were out of that horrible fucking dimension, Scott would tell me that my rather charming first words sounded a little different then what I thought I said. Standing there on my last fumes of willpower and blood content, I looked at the six-foot man and growled/giggled out a drunken response of "~Heeeeey metal guy, hlep a guuurl out huh?" before falling flat on my face.