Episode VIII - Bloodbath at the Zombie-Robot Death House

Our gallant crew landed on a small weed-infested balcony set among the steep roof gables, a waist-high wall along two sides allowing a view out over the dense jungle below. Jek leaned out over the parapet to see if he could see anything hostile on the ground and startled a small, vaguely reptilian flying monkey-creature clinging to the wall; it took off flapping frantically across the tree-tops and got about twenty metres before a tree-fern-like thing uncurled a long tongue (for want of a better word) and snatched it out of the air. "Crikey" said Jek, "It's a good thing we flew".

Checking out their immediate surroundings, they found one wall of the balcony entirely covered in extremely filthy glass, another side consisted of a covered walkway leading to a door in a third. Kappo checked the windows but could make out nothing through the grime; then he tried the door and found it locked — a simple mechanical lock which he made short work of with his trusty TIC burglary kit. He huddled behind the door as he opened it (some might say cowered, but that may be a little harsh) and waited for the others to set off any booby-traps. Er, that is, to begin exploring the lightless interior. The doors opened on to a landing at the head of a stair heading downwards into inky blackness. The team switched on their suit lights and made their way fearlessly down the steps, with Kappo fearlessly bringing up the rear.

Emerging from the stairwell they found themselves on a walkway overlooking a huge, dark space. Last off the stair, Kappo caught a glimpse of a bright pin-point flash of red light from out of the darkness down the walkway; immediately assuming the worst (i.e. that it was a targeting laser and that everyone was about to be mown down in a hail of gunfire) he activated his shields and squawked a warning to the others, who all also activated their shields. Everyone milled about glowing and humming, waiting for the attack. Which didn't come. Never mind, better safe than sorry. After a short while everyone calmed down a little and began exploring their surroundings.

Almost immediately to the right from the stairwell they found a heavy fire door, locked and immoveable. Looking out over the parapet by the light of her suit lamps, K'pok could make out piles of what appeared to be wooden crates six or seven metres below her feet. K'pok fastened her suit tether to the handle of the fire door and detaching it from her suit, tossed it over the edge of the walkway. She activated her A.G. harness and floated down on to a large crate below, and then on to the floor, using the tether as a guide. Once down, she caught the merest hint of movement and again the red light appeared — this time it was obvious that it was a scanning beam flashing across K'pok. She made her way across to where it was coming from, and found a peculiar thing — a small cyborg about the size of an infant, clearly non-human, its biological elements reduced to skeletal remains. It ignored her and continued working on some kind of system behind a wall access panel.

Meanwhile, Weptish had come down the same way, and had found a pair of doors and another stair. He immediately began to try to get the door handles off — a pair of simple metal pipes on frames — presumably because they might come in handy some time. K'pok called him away from his mission of vandalism to get his opinion on the cyborg. Fascinated, he bent over it and soon found the off-switch; he deactivated the little thing and poped it into his backpack. It might come in handy some time. K'pok went back to meet the other two, sliding down the tether without the benefit of A.G. (the GM having remembered this time), and Weptish, unable to resist the temptation to fix something, began poking around inside the access panel.

Jek and Kappo, in an effort to do something productive, decided to start searching the crates for data cubes on the off-chance that they might be in one of the hundreds of crates. Working with a will, Jek smashed open the largish crate K'pok had used as a landing stage and made a grisly discovery — the crate was full of human remains! The corpses were all entangled and fairly well stuck together by their own congealed juices into a great amorphous mass, but the skulls and other easily-identifiable bones made it obvious that they had once been people. Needless to say, Jek was a little shaken by the discovery, and called K'pok and Kappo over to see. Unfortunately Kappo had made his own discovery, in a similar vein, which brought on such an attack of the heeby-jeebies that he immediately ran shrieking out through the doors beside the lower stairs, around the corner and smack into a wall (which brought him back to his senses after a moment or two). K'pok went after Kappo, leaving Jek with the macabre cluster-fuck slowly oozing out through the broken timbers of the crate.

Weptish was blissfully unaware of all this; he'd been happily tinkering with the guts of the system the little cyborg had been working on, and happily made the last connection....

Everything went dark as all the suit lamps shut down, and off in the now absolute darkness massive doors could be heard grinding and booming closed. For some reason everybody immediately started ragging on poor old Weptish. "What did you do? WHAT DID YOU DO?" was the gist of the babble, to which he replied with a shrug (which noone could see) and "I din' do nothin'! I was just fixing it!". Since all the suit radios had also gone dead, all that anyone could hear of anyone else's screeching was a muffled murmer, which was probably a good thing on the whole.

Groping their way by feel, everybody made their way back up to the mezzanine, hoping and praying that they wouldn't end up thigh-deep in rotting corpses on the way. The exertion of clambering back up the slender tether brought on a great deal of sweating and panting.... Jek realised that he couldn't see any of the tell-tales of any of the suits' life-support systems, which explained the shortness of breath. Deciding that a relatively slow death by radiation poisoning was preferable to a quicker one by asphyxiation, he undid his helmet (discovering the most incredible eye-watering stench in the process) and groped his way around the rest of the group, shouting through their muffling helmets to do the same. All did, except for Kappo who refused outright to expose himself to god knows what contagion, and instead he fell to the ground unconscious and suffocating. Taking advantage of his sudden cooperativeness, K'pok took his helmet off so that he could breathe and left him to wake up in his own time. Jek and Weptish meanwhile had been feeling along the wall for the stairwell back out, and found instead something that felt discouragingly like a door.

K'pok decided that some kind of light was essential, and so climbed down once more — this time, alas, not so successfully avoiding the putrescent mass. She groped in the darkness for as much broken lumber as she could find around the crate, and made her way back up to the others. By the time she returned, Kappo was awake again and once Jek had ignited one of the makeshift torches by the power of his mighty mind he set about trying to open the now-revealed door. It looked depressingly sturdy, and proved to be so when he failed to blow it open with the last of his explosive door-openers.

Jek and K'pok had gone exploring more of the mezzanine in the hopes of finding some way out, and not far away they found what they assumed was the other end of the stair they'd found below. No help there. Further around they found more piles of crates, and opened one of them with some misgivings.... fortunately, no rotting corpses this time. Instead they found crates full of all sorts of rubbish — cheesy paperback romance novels, old kitchen appliances, trinkets and childrens' toys. While thus engaged, they both heard a mechanical chunka-chunka-chunka noise coming from through the wall in front of them, and hurriedly started back to rejoin the others. Bringing up the rear, Jek saw K'pok's tell-tales light up again, and her suit lamps came back on just in time for her to see, coming through an open blast door, a nightmarish abomination — a ghastly patchwork of robot and human corpse, its rotting head lolling vacantly back and forth with the movement of its mechanical appendages. It's probably a good thing that Vulcans aren't imaginative. It attacked K'pok, flailing with its pincers and trying to grab her as another came through the door behind, making for Jek.

Kappo fired at the thing with Jek's assault rifle (Jek having decided that it was a useless weapon) and managed to break something in its legs, so that all it could do was stump around and around in small circles. An encouraging start! Regrettably, the noise of shooting meant that he was blissfully unaware of the door behind him opening and three (THREE!) more of the hideous things clanking up behind him — Weptish, not so unaware, gave a girlish shriek and promptly ran away over the balcony and down the tether to the warehouse floor, leaving Kappo to deal with the zombie-bots.

Yet another zombie-bot appeared to threaten Jek and K'pok, and Jek used his pyrokinesis to set its biological bits afire. It didn't appear to discomode it at all, which was discouraging. Yet another one came through; there seemed to be no end of the blasted things! A mighty battle commenced, Jek and K'pok engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the things. Jek managed to punch one of them hard enough that it stopped working, and K'pok threw one bodily over the railing — unfortunately it didn't let go of her and they both went over together. Even more unfortunately, K'pok landed underneath it on the stairs, which hurt quite a lot, but the zombie-bot went rolling away down the stairs giving her a chance to pull herself together and stagger back up on to the mezzanine.

Weptish, meanwhile, had scampered back up the stairs with his antique pistol just in time to be grabbed by another stinking zombie-bot. He managed to wriggle free, and even to bounce a bullet or two off its carrion-shrouded carapace, but to no avail and he was eventually carried off writhing and straining to get free. The same fate fell to K'pok; still suffering from the battering she'd received falling over the railing, she was soon knocked out by another of the 'bots and also carried away. Jek had seen the same thing happening to Kappo, overwhelmed by three of the horrors simultaneously and ran off after them in the hopes of saving him; he chased them through several rooms, catching up just in time to see the elevator doors closing.

Jek has forced open the elevator doors and is listening to the elevator car disappearing into the depths below.

All in all, the situation could be better.

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