[12-13] The Underground (Carmelita)

[Karl Jak]

Now on her own, our favorite (non-murdered) anthropomorphic detective finds herself spelunking into darkness unknown.

[Carmelita]

After a while, Carmelita felt her sickness subside, though whether that was the inoculation at work or just a lull between waves she couldn’t say. Her dizziness and dry heaving returned to a pounding headache, and so she continued on down the tunnel.

The stone quickly became bedrock, and it was as she took a breather she noticed that it seemed very roughly hewn. The tunnel was quickly becoming less and less professionally cut as she continued, as though whoever was excavating it had been pressed for time.

The smell of singed air through her cloak was still strong. She considered dropping it and getting a smell of the air, but decided against it for now. When she next found somewhere to rest, she’d take a breather.

As she turned a corner, however, she caught sight of a snarling face in the distance. The head of the ghoul snapped round and it charged towards her at lightning speeds. With a cry of surprise, she loosed the ball of electricity into its face and flattened herself into a nook in the wall.

The ghoul screamed, sparks flitting across its skin and tatters of what seemed to be a suit as it pressed its claws to its face, pawing its nose and eyes. With the light gone, Carmelita could only watch from her dark nook as the sparks flickered and died, and focused on her belt.

The sound of loud sniffing and the scraping of claws on the rock cut its way through her headache and she concentrated hard. She was invisible, and now she worked to be undetectable. Every sign of her presence would be masked, provided she could focus on herself and those trying to find her. Carmelita’s scent would register as the tang of the earth, the slight sound of her shifting along the wall as background noise and the breath of wind as she passed within a whisker’s width of her hunter would be dismissed as random movements of air. The tang of her sweat in the air as she continued down the tunnel would, to the ghoul, be a dead end, and her muffled treads the thud of trees far above. Her-

She hissed as her muzzle impacted against the wall, and her concentration failed her for a moment. The sound of sniffing increased in volume behind her, and she refocused as she began walking more quickly, her right hand and the shock pistol in it brushing along the wall and guiding her along. The sound of sniffing kept up behind her though, the scent already detected and now some confused yowls as it continued to hunt its prey.

There was a scream from in front of her, a different pitch, and an answering scream from behind her. She pressed herself into another crack in the wall and the sounds of a violent altercation could be heard. Something hot, wet and sticky splashed into her hair and dripped slowly down her face, rolling off her muzzle and into her shoulder fur. She shuddered but kept her focus.

After a while, the sound of claws diminished and the sound of a triumphant ghoul feasting off its fellow prompted her to move on. Carmelita turned a couple of corners before lighting her shock pistol again and cautiously proceeding, maintaining focus as she went.

There were three more ghouls she encountered as she travelled, each of them bigger and more ugly than the last. Signs of vermin bones preceded their retreats, and Carmelita took care in releasing her shock pistol’s charge into the rock before sneaking past each one. After a while she turned a corner and found herself face-to-face with a large metal door with a blinking keypad to its left.

Carmelita examined the keypad carefully. Three numbers had residue on them, the 2, 5 and 7, and the display seemed long enough for up to ten digits. She thought for a moment, then checked her password combinations against the numerals on a phone. ‘Syntech’ would be 7968325, so that was out, but ‘KarlJak’ would read 5275525. She punched the code in and to her relief the sound of pneumatics sounded from behind the entrance, the doors parting to reveal an ill-lit lab. A few prowling figures made Carmelita breath deeply, ignoring her headache and continuing to both thank her stealth cloak and focus on her notice-me-not belt.

The shelving units had seen better days, many of them broken and their contents smashed and long since evaporated. Cages for lab animals lay tone open and rusted, sometimes so violently that they lay in a pile of metal splinters or glass shards. Corridors and rooms, lit with phosphorescent plant life and still operating bulbs, were dank and littered with debris. Pipes lay cracked, dripping fluids into puddles of unnatural colours, while the sounds of beleaguered machinery made an echoing backtrack to the environment.

Carmelita got a good look at the inhabitants as she stalked unnoticed around the facility. Monstrosities, long since having abandoned the form of the bipedal humans they had once been, rarely dressed with their lab coats and suits and more likely covered in matted fur or daubed warts of lurid colours, they prowled the labs, scrapping when they intruded on another's territory and scrounging whatever they could from the fungal growths and the vermin colonies and drinking from whatever liquids they could find.

The Inspector found her destination at the back of the facility, built into a secure room with no occupants. She fastened the solid door securely behind her and let out a sigh as she finally relaxed her focus, instead examining the escape pods properly.

Huge tubes had been drilled through the rock, metal rails slightly rusty ascending into the darkness. Metal capsules, glider wings and rocket propulsion collapsed into nothing larger than a small car, stood in rows, a good thirty odd in this room alone. A large metal bunker door marked ‘pod storage bays’ suggested that there were enough to evacuate the entire facility buried deeper in the labs.

Carmelita set the briefcase with the cure down on a bench and the paint bucket of Omnilium gunk next to it, holstering her shock pistol as an afterthought. She stalked over to the control panel built into an observation and launch room and tapped the power button gently. The screens lit up brightly, but the information they displayed was disheartening.

++Escape Pod status: Non-functional.++

++Maintenance scheduled: -999 hours time.++

++Pod gantry unresponsive, maintenance required++

++Warning, faults detected in pods 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17…+Launching these pods will result in catastrophic break-up. Please retire, recycle and replace++

++Pod 3 non-responsive. Ignition sequence jammed. Battery drained. Liquid nitrogen depleted. Please replace parts and materials from the maintenance bay.++

Carmelita bowed her head and began working on trying to salvage the components necessary to replace those of pod 3 from the rest of the pods. It was going to be a difficult task, and she hadn’t even begun working out how to use it to disperse the inoculation, if it worked...

[Karl Jak]

End of Round 12

I'll have a PM to you a little later today

[Carmelita]

Carmelita’s background in mechanical and electronic repairs was rather... second hand. Bentley and Murray had shown her some of the ropes, but she’d never really needed to pitch in properly with the two of them around. Then she’d rescued Chip and had just as readily allowed the girl to take a place that Carmelita had no business being in.

At the end of the day, that meant that Carmelita was not the person who should be fixing high-tech escape pods. It didn’t help that it was soon clear that the inoculation was definitely not a cure, as while she never dropped back into that low, near useless dry-heaving, she still had the worst headache imaginable.

With this in mind, Carmelita changed her plan of attack. She was clearly not suited to fix up a proper cure, nor was she suited to retrofitting an already damaged escape pod into being a crop duster. What would be a more appropriate aim would be to repair the escape pod enough to get somewhere which had those facilities and the experts to use them.

The Inspector set about following the instructions on screen, pulling apart the damaged pods for their components and fuel supplies and repairing the nearly ready one as best she could. Tightening bolts and attaching fuel lines was not outside her understanding (she did own a squad car back in the day) and while she might not know what the circuit boards did she was perfectly capable of wiring them in correctly.

In between stints of working on the escape pods, she snuck through the facility, salvaging what files and documents were available from computers and filing cabinets. She dodged fungal spores, scrounged food and water from an overlooked supply closet, and after avoiding a territorial display between ghouls she settled back down in the escape pod bay for a bit of light reading with a tin of beans cooked over a welding torch.

It was dark, dark reading, to say the least. Every horrible thing on the island had stemmed from the disease, it appeared. Some were afflicted mentally, going steadily more and more insane before being driven to cannibalism, or worse. Others were mutated, being horribly deformed beyond the point of survival, or entering comatose states from which they would arise as zombies. Those who suffered from both had been made into the monsters and ghouls she had seen. All of it stemmed from the raw, untreated Omnilium ores mined here. All of it could be directly attributed to the poor ethical judgement of Syntech and, consequently, its head honcho, Karl Jak.

It was cold comfort to Carmelita. A cure at this stage seemed unlikely, in her unprofessional opinion, not for those who were far gone. Amber would have to be put down, and hopefully revived at the fountain, and the zombies would need to be euthanised as well. The cannibals might still be treatable, the mental damage might be curable. The ghouls and monsters would probably fall into the former category rather than the latter.

A lot of death, that was what Karl Jak was responsible for. Carmelita pondered the escape pod thoughtfully. From the diagram, it would produce wings, wheels and jets in order to escape the island before setting down in the water and using a solar powered turbine to go the rest of the way to syntech headquarters. There was no reason she couldn’t set down by the town hall, grab a copy of the census data for the island and use that as evidence when she brought Karl Jak up on charges of mass manslaughter.

Her thoughts decided, she returned to repairs with a vengeance. After the light finally turned green, Carmelita climbed aboard, secured the bucket of raw Omnilium and the inoculation briefcase, checked her eyepieces and the data contained within, and prepared for lift off.

A loud klaxon sounded, red lights flashing on each wall. The escape pod she was in lit up from the outside, floodlights illuminating the vertical tube with the guide rails along it and, in the distance, a large hole opened in the side of a mountain, sunlight and blue skies visible as a faint speck at the end of the tunnel.

Carmelita clutched her seat tightly as a rumbling began beneath her. A flare could be seen behind the glass as acceleration clenched her gut, pulling her down viciously. Up she went, slowly at first but quickly picking up speed before roaring out of the tube in a great flare of light, up into the air and ready for her to wrestle the flight path round to land in the town.