CORPs group (Group 1)

[i_hate_posses]

Who: Loki, Rube Sofer, Morgan Adams, Charlie Prince--NPCs WELCOME!
When: 1st day of Port
Where: LV-426; colony; on the way to the reactor--different path

Comments

[i_hate_posses]

Charlie glanced over at Rube at the Reaper's comment. After watching as his warden sliced his hand open and cursed, Charlie nearly stomped over in frustration to do it himself. However, he quickly changed his mind when the Norse god let loose a stream of fire. In fact, Charlie backpedaled quickly, aiming whatever ammunition remained in his gun straight at Loki. It was only through sheer force of will and a last minute reaction that the Outlaw didn't actually pull the trigger.

"The hell are you doin', you dumb shit?!" He demanded, voice raspy and irate. One look to Rube and Morgan, though, and Charlie remembered the punishment for turning the guns on another Barge resident...

He snarled, lowering his weapon and stalked forward, away from the others (lest he be driven to shoot them all and say 'fuck it!' to the consequences). He stopped a scant moment later as he came upon something all together unfamiliar.

"What the hell is all this?" He inquired, looking around what appeared to be...well, he had no idea what it was supposed to be, but he didn't like it.

[onderhaus]

Rube came up alongside Charlie and Loki, his weapon dangling at his side in a most un-menacing manner. Rube was not much of a fighter.

"What's all the commotion?" he asked, then froze.

"What the fuck is that?"

[gimmethemap]

Morgan joined them soon enough, gazing upward at the oddness of the structure around them. It was obvious it'd been built around whatever the manmade architecture had been. This stuff looked almost...alive. She swallowed and spoke into what apparently made Kaylee hear her. "If the colonists are in there, then that's where we're going," she said, pressing onward, but watching her motion sensor now with anxiety. Of course she came screeching to a stop and nearly cried out when she came face to face to something definitely human, but no longer living.

A hand shot up to cover her mouth. The corpse fixed to the wall was noticably small, a child, face glistening with a sheen of moisture, bluish, with a gaping crevasse where the chest should have been. She stepped close to something that started to crunch under her boot, so she moved off of it, then bent down to poke at the odd thing with her rifle.

The obviously dead remains of some spidery creature lay illuminated on the ground beneath her light.

"Jesus Christ," she breathed.

[i_hate_posses]

In the light of the discovery, Charlie forgot all about his intentions to ignore and annoy his warden, turning to him with confusion. "I said, what the hell is this?" He demanded from the other man, as if he expected Rube to have the answer. He was a warden; he'd been the one to tell Charlie they had to come here in the first place; therefore, he had to know and he damned had better start talking, 'cause if he didn't have a clue,...

Well, Charlie wasn't stupid. He wasn't gonna stick around if there was somethin' in there that wasn't natural. Looking at the dead creature (which the outlaw likened to a scorpion), Charlie made the connection in his mind that perhaps all the acid residue they'd encountered was something like the venom one found on the tips of the arachnid's tails.

That wasn't entirely correct, but the cowboy wasn't too far off either. And Charlie did not want to deal with giant scorpions.

[onderhaus]

Rube had to turn away, covering his mouth. He hid his weakness by bringing his hand up to his forehead and wiping away the beads of sweat. No matter what he told the other reapers back in New Jersey, reaping a child always got to him - and this body left him feeling just as ill.

Worse, even.

To give himself something to do, he said to the Tech group, "Kaylee, you guys see what we're seeing?"

[gimmethemap]

Morgan held up a finger for quiet as she listened to the transmission Kaylee was sending through. She explained the nature of the spider creatures, and the open leathery 'flowers' in the room -- and then the hole in the child's chest. "That's...pleasant," she murmured. "So there are still colonists that're alive in this?"

A cry of alarm from Kaylee's end made her jump, particularly so when she felt her compass buzzing in one of her pockets.

West was in danger.

"Shit," she hissed, moving further inward.

[i_hate_posses]

Charlie was quick to follow. "What are you doing, Girly?"

It wasn't that he cared per se...but at the same time, the message from Kaylee had been clear. The dead child and dead-scorpion thing were not natural and Charlie had no interest in furthering the unnatural process. He glanced over his shoulder at Rube and Loki in a 'Ain't one of you gonna stop her?' manner before decided he'd just as well act as support and back her up in whatever she was fixin' to do.

[onderhaus]

Rube followed the other three, bringing up the rear, looking quite worried. He didn't like the inexplicable. He liked things that had reasons - and if they didn't have them, he liked to assign the reason himself.

Trouble was, he couldn't come up with a reason for the scorpion thing. It looked a bit like a graveling, but the resemblance was like second cousins.

"Morgan, try to stay with us," he called after her, sounding nervous. "I don't like this."

Loki's comment set his nerves on edge. He tapped the god on the shoulder with his flamethrower and snapped, "Shut the fuck up."

[gimmethemap]

"Something's wrong," she said, glancing back for only half a second to recognize Charlie. Really, all she was thinking about was making sure West didn't get killed or worse. Her compass was still humming, which was a good thing, all she had to do was find him. Easier said than done, really, especially considering she only had a basic understanding of how all the tracking devices they'd gotten worked. After fussing with one of them for too long she finally gave in to temptation and pulled out her compass to see which way it was pointing.

"Follow or stay, Rube; this is part of the job."

She followed the arrow, obeying each turn it suggested and expecting nothing save that her teammates keep up.

She came to a hard stop when the arrow walked her directly into one of the walls, and looking up she realized why. Hanging there, suspended much as the child had been, was a person, their chest still intact, thankfully, though their neighbors were not so fortunate. There were empty eggs all around, the floor littered with the corpses of the strange creatures.

All empty -- now Morgan was wary of that.

The person appeared to be breathing.

[i_hate_posses]

"Yes, onwards and upwards! Through the cave we go. Maybe if we're lucky, we can find whatever did this to the child! Won't that be fun?"

No, Charlie reckoned, it wouldn't be fun in the least. It was suicide to go take on anythin' you weren't prepared to deal with or that was more of a match than you. Charlie likened the situation to the Pinks-- even though he and the Boss hated Pinkertons, they didn't go 'bout takin' 'em all on. The Pinks had more men and guns than the gang ever did (though Charlie didn't deny that he liked a challenge every now and then; for example, he had been quite happy to take on a Pink-coach with a Gatling). Goin' up against the entire operation wouldn't have done much good. Killing 'em one by one as they came across them, however, proved much more satisfying.

Point being, Charlie didn't mind killing these things, whatever they were, as they encountered them. But intentionally looking for them or going after them? That wasn't smart. It was rather foolish and Charlie didn't like the idea one bit.

"Shut the fuck up."

Charlie snorted. Of course, if it bothered his warden so much to do it, maybe he could manage goin' a bit further in. Girly was leading the way--should anything bad happen, he could always return fire and make a retreat. So instead of speaking his true opinion, he just looked back at Rube, grinning in his ever-so-charming way. "What's wrong, Warden? Ain't you the one who wants to help? I reckon the best way to help is the kill whatever's doin' all this."

He nodded to Loki with a, 'I totally agree with you' expression, though the Outlaw was already considering how to get away should things get ugly. Speaking of ugly, the new sight they came upon was anything but pretty. The various remains of the victims of chest-bursts were certainly not pleasant to be around, though morbidly fascinating to the man. He'd killed lots of poor bastards, but none had ever turned out like this. The smell was unique, to say the least.

"Looks like they ain't all dead," Charlie mused, casting a glance at the sole survivor, though taking more of an unhealthy interested in the corpses.

[tlv_xenomorph]

Eyes snapped open, framed in a pale complexion of sickliness. Either somehow drained of life or the victim of malnutrition, the poor creature quite immobile. Short of hair, it was difficult to tell even what gender the victim was, in this every-present gloom, but the voice left no doubts.

"K-kill me..."

Weakened, on the brink, what little energy the woman still possessed was now expended in moments not too unlike those of an injured bird, perhaps unknowingly mirroring those happening elsewhere in the reactor.

"Plea... Please..."

At first, a shivering of breath, then a fully-fledged convulsion, the woman lurched forth in her prison of hardened mucous. A pained cry, before the movement repeated itself - a wretched cry accompanying the loud snapping of bones. Another, then another and another, until flesh and bone was breached; a blind, snake-like thing punching through; its head, the size of a man's clenched fist. The colonist had died with the last of her screams, replaced only with a vicious hissing, as the thing fought to emerge into life.

Emerge and kill.

[tlv_xenomorph]

The moment another infantile abomination was incinerated elsewhere in the reactor, within a shrieking envelope of flame, succumbing to lapping incineration, so sounded an unearthly chorus of distant hisses. An unnerving impression of threat, seeming to come from simultaneously nowhere and all around.

From those same, mucous-clad walls, chitenous armour departed from hibernating niches. Overwhelming strength, speed and razor-honed instinct came alive, in singularly co-ordinated movements; the genetic memory of thousands, if not millions of generations, before them, filling their owners with perfected killer instinct.

These were no mere insects to be crushed underfoot. They were a merciless wave of nightmarishly organic horror, closing in, all around, with a degree of stealth unmatched in the known animal kingdom. Things wishing to touch, to claim, to have... To take victims, entomb them and do something terrible. These were no invaders, able to be dispatched with some heroic grin and one-liner wit. Armoured in natural alloy as tough as any starship hull and with strength capable of punching through steel, the visitors to their nursery were about to discover precisely what horrors had caused a minimum of 158 men, women and children to fall beneath it and serve as living incubators for its young.

And if eyes were the window to another being's soul, what, then, did it say for such creatures to have been born without them?

Devices constructed to detect the slightest of movements now came alive, like miniature Christmas trees: Their pitch now warning of well over more than one hundred contacts at range starting to close in. Not merely from in front, but all around. For these intruders had placed themselves in the dragon's den and it was time to pay these reapers of flesh and bone their due with a bounty of suffering.

The metaphorical kraken had woken from its slumber... And it did hunger.