Matt B Blogging

005. New skin who dis?

Trembling as the adrenaline wears off, Mongoose pushes off the floor, to float in the centre of the corridor. She scatters her LED rods again, turns her headlamp back on. Her face, shoulder and leg are starting to hurt. She tries to speak, and a croak comes out. She clears her throat. "Astrid, take a photo of my shoulder wound, please". Her vacsuit has a hole on her left thigh, front and back, her skinny leg in the baggy suit getting grazed, with a long red burn.

Astrid wheezes on her near depleted thrusters, and a photo of Mongoose's shoulder and appears on her wrist computer. Another breach to the vacsuit, and an ugly puckered burn makes Mongoose a bit queasy. She pushes into the pharmacy proper, and starts looking for pain killers and bandages.

[Heal - strong hit with a match!]

This pharmacy has a fridge marked plasma burn treatment! Mongoose carefully takes off her belt, wrist computer, gloves, and puts them in a mesh net bag with a magnetic clasp she sticks to the side of the fridge while she strips down enough to treat the areas. She applies the antiseptic (stingy!), and skin-repair gel - which immediately numbs the area (blessed relief - Mongoose moans as the pain disappears) and promotes skin regrowth - the skin it makes is generally lighter tone than the original - this ship has the good stuff! There are plenty of burn scars on Mongoose's bare arms that show she hasn't had access to this stuff before.

The hot plastic burns on her face look very minor, but she rubs some more gel on the marks anyway, before pocketing the rest of the gel.

Every spacer has vacsuit repair patches. You have to be careful with them - they bond instantly to vacsuit fabric at the molecular level - two small ones for the leg hole, one big hexagon patch for the shoulder.

[Repair - strong hit]

Perfect! This vacsuit is starting to look more like a series of patches than a proper suit - but it's airtight. Maybe she can score another one while she's here. She's less worried about pissing off Wayfinder now. Fuck her and her evil fucking Clan with their medical experiments, killer bots, and assorted death traps. Mongoose is true to her vow, and she'll deliver the stuff as sworn, but, man, there's going to be a reckoning.

She puts her gear back on, recovers her light rods, and stops to pilfer as many expensive drugs as she can carry

[Resupply - miss - pay the price - waste resources]

All of this stuff is expired! Worthless. Annoyed, she heads back out, helmet and Astrid attached to her belt as she retraces her mad escape route. She kicks the 'dead' assault bot once she's past it, to propel her forward, but mainly to kick that fucker noisily down the corridor. She finds her welding torch, but it's been shot to pieces. She was given that by her mum, years ago - one more thing lost, to be replaced.

[-1 supply]

OK, regroup, is there anyway to get to Ops without going through the corpse travesty room?

[Oracle: yes]

Yeah, that first Ward corridor, there was a branch off to the right that should meet up with the main corridor. Phew. She wasn't sure she could deal with that again.

[Deleted the parallel Vow - combined them into one: Retrieve the Computer Core and Vayan belongings from The Drift Runner]