JL | Xue'Daio Nox & Lt. Evan 'Weirdo' Merlin | "Things That Go Boom In The Night"

Posted on Fri Apr 6th, 2018 @ 10:17am by Commander Evan Merlin & Xue'Daio Nox Tr'Verelan

Mission: Lacuna
Location: Cold Station Theta
Timeline: SD 241804.06

With one long jump the Lietenant crossed most of Central Ops. The young Ensign manning the Ops panel looked up, blinking with confusion. "What the h-?" His panel was lit up like a Chistmas tree.

"You've got incoming, Ensign." The Lieutenant reached over the kid's shoulder and tapped the screen. The Ensign hadn't been here long, and if this wasn't his first posting since leaving the Academy, there couldn't have been all that many before.

One voice came over the speaker, sounding strained. "-some kind of explosion. I can't even say what…" the voice broke off, coughing. "I've called Commander th'Zarath and I think he'll be down here as soon as possible, but I don't know if this has any impact on the turbo lifts so it could be some time before-"

"Where is she calling from?" the Lieutenant asked.

Ensign Willis glanced at his panel, muttered a deck number.

The voice on the other end of the channel picked up on it. "But it looks like at least four or five decks are affected. I can't even determine what's been hit or how or… I mean, just, fuck. Sorry, sirs."

"That's okay. Who am I talking to?" the Lieutenant asked, trying to project an aura of calm he didn't feel.

"Chief Merriweather, sir, Gamma shift engineer on duty." The chief coughed again.

"Alright. Are there any casualties that you know of?"

"Sir, I have no idea. I can't even scan… Just get someone down here quick…"

The Lieutenant ran a hand through his wild hair. "We're working on it."

---

Things were hot, the air was heavy with a combination of smoke and panic thick enough to choke a horse. Klaxons blared, their shrill sounds becoming disorienting to the white Empress as she tried her best to acoustically navigate the corridors through the shadowy red light. Echolocation was proving difficult, the reverberations of sounds and footsteps all around ricocheting off corridor walls and steel beneath proved to make for a rather hair raising situation.

Releasing a breath she'd been holding, Xue'Daio choked on the acrid air she was forced to take back in to her delicate lungs. It was no doubt rich with toxins from melted plastics, metal, plasma, the Gods only knew. Her head swam. At some point her guard had gone missing, lost behind her as she ducked and wove between bodies, Intel and Engineers, in order to seek better ground along the route the initial responders had herded people down only to reach the end of a corridor and be faced with a gaping, flame filled and electrical arc illuminated void. It yawned at them in an obscene smile, promising that they were trapped, like rats, between a steadily gathering storm. An ear twitched. Metal groaned. There'd be containment fields up soon, but likely not before the floor she and seven others stood on, melted and gave way, spilling them into whatever chasm lay before them.

She shivered at the thought, blinking away the heat that burned at her sensitive eyes, and turned to face the direction they'd come in. Walls were beginning to buckle and swell, promising that they too contained fire. "Run!" She screamed, gathering the front of her silken robes, "As fast as you can, just run!" - and that was precisely what the woman did. In a shiver of soot smeared starlight, the glowing albino Queen raced towards the only direction that made sense; any possible route that would take them 'up' and away, streaking towards a way off the obviously injured station.

---

Gradually more information came in. Still not much, but what there was, was bad. Whole decks appeared to be offline, there were power fluctuations which were noticeable even here in Ops, the light flickered and a few more vibrations were felt. Sickbay was placed on alert, but thus far nobody had been brought in yet. Site to site transporters proved to be very unreliable, between the power fluctuations, containment fields and bad sensor readings. And from here, in Ops, all the Lieutenant could do was sit (or stand) and watch. He couldn't run down and put out the fires, save the wounded and start repairs. All he could do was watch, coordinate, and watch.

He'd also tried to contact Aine, but thus far, no reply. That worried him, but right now, there wasn't anything he could do about that either.

---

Hours. It felt like hours. Maybe it was hours, hot long grueling hours spent climbing from one deck to another and running as fast as legs could and would take them, but eventually they were freed onto a deck that had light and very little in the way of smoke. There'd been no heat when she tried the hatch, and for that she was thankful. The access tube they'd traveled upon was steadily getting hotter and filling with smoke, essentially becoming a dead end and no longer safe to traverse.

Xue's legs and arms were trembling and screaming from exhaustion and exertion. Her lungs burned like the fire she ran from, and the shine of her had long since been diminished by the amount of soot and ash and sweat and grit and grime and grease that covered her from crown to tip of toe. At some point she'd managed to lose one her her slipper like shoes, it had fallen thousands upon thousands of feet to a horribly death below. Better it than she, she'd reasoned and continued to climb. But now they were there, in a group, coughing as they leaned against bulkheads and lay on the deck. She was one of those. A heap of dingy pewter sprawled, undignified, across the floor, her rose colored eyes glassy and blood shot as they studied ceiling tiles and the flickering lights above.

She could feel the blisters forming on her fingers, the sting of broken skin across her knuckles. She was alive, as were the gaggle of officers that had blindly followed her on her quest for safety. It was almost laughable, really. Maybe later, in the safe warmth of a bath, she might actually laugh. "Evan..." His name, or at least what they'd titled him, passed as a whisper on her lips. Had he survived? "Evan?" This time a query, too tired to keep it simply internal, she allowed that name to cross over her tongue and mind at the same time.

A nagging sensation, something which felt like a hook in his mind, disregarded in the hectic crisis. Time had painted a clearer picture now, as more people arrived in Ops: Commander th'Zarath, the Chief Engineer, amongst them. Not quite time enough to take a breather, but at least the power in Ops was stable again, the affected area mostly contained, though it was still not clear whether there were still people down there, and in what condition.

But that hook felt stronger now, closer, much harder to ignore. Even while talking, the Lieutenant found himself wandering over to what was usually one of the quietest, most out of the way areas of Central Ops – the very place where he'd been when he felt the explosion for the first time, while talking with Lieutenant Shran. He fleetingly wondered where Anaxar was. Somewhere in the midst of the chaos the man had quietly disappeared.

Voices. There were voices here, faint ones, coming from the other side of one of the maintenance hatches. He pulled it open with some effort – the thing stuck, for some reason, and stared. The first person he saw on the other side was Xue.

The sound of the hatch opening, at first, made the baby fine hairs at the nape of her neck stand on end. It sounded too much like crumbling and twisting metal for her liking, and she laying prone and far too spent to do much about it did nothing more than turn her head to watch whatever it was coming for them.

The silhouette of him, his wild black mane, quieted and relieved her at once and.she blew a quiet, smoky laugh that may have been his name, but instantly turned into a cough. "They need medical attention..." Managed to squeeze out, a loose gesture made to the officers around her. Where her own guard had gone was a mystery, and one she feared had ended in tragedy. But if Evan was there, which he certainly was, she was safe no matter how tattered or dirty or tired she was.

"I daresay you all do," the Lieutenant breathed. He still stared in shock at the soot-covered, wide-eyed, staring faces behind her. He lifted Xue gently out of the maintenance tube and, resisting the urge to hug her tight, placed her carefully in the nearest chair. "You…" he turned his head. "Ensign Willis. Try to get someone from Medical here right now. Anyone else here who knows how to apply medpacks?" He pointed at someone who'd raised a finger. "Good. Get over here and see what you can do. You can use Comman- my office." While he talked, he lifted out more people.

All the while, his mind was awhirl. The explosion hadn't been near the Ambassadorial quarters, as far as he knew. But given Xue's tendency to roam the station, that didn't mean much. But her people would be frantic by now- "Ensign Willis, hail the Stenellian delegation and please let them know their Empress is here in Ops."

"Kiy'yan is lost." Xue's whispers were far stronger cerebral than they were audible, but it didn't stop her from trying to communicate and explain things. At some point, after the last person was freed, she looped a finger into Merlin's sleeve and gently tugged. Out of everything that could have happened, out of every outcome, this was the one that made the most sense and promised that those waiting for news would get it, that those who had followed her through the panic filled dark would be taken care of. The loss of one life, though mournful, was better than losing them all. "Thank you." She nodded towards him, clearing her throat, "Let them know... I'm ok." Was she? That remained to be seen. She couldn't see herself completely, but from the singed nature of her tarnished robes and the state of her arms and hands, the snarled dirty lengths of her hair, she knew she most definitely wasn't perfect. The cough that rattled her lungs seemed to be in agreement. "Just need sleep and a bath. They need attention, though." She nodded, starting to feel the adrenaline leech from her system.

"We're still looking for survivors." That, and trying to contain all of the situation, and trying to make sense of it all. The Lieutenant wanted to comfort her, and help everyone else, and lead here (and just where was the Captain? Also caught in a blast somewhere? Trapped between force fields? Or trying to make her way up to Ops but unable to do it because of the turbolift situation?). If he could've split himself up into three or more Lieutenants, fissioned like a bacteria, he would've done so.

Instead, time seemed to slow around him, around them. "I can't give you a bath, but I can give you a quiet place to sleep. The stations's still in lockdown, or I'd have contacted one of your vessels and have you beamed off the station, but I can't drop the lockdown yet, not even for this."

"I have the Stenellian Ambassador on the comm, Lieutenant," Ensign Willis piped up, somewhere behind them. "He demands to speak to the Empress."

"Sleep and a bath will have to wait." the Empress responded, almost as if she were completely privy to his thoughts. She struggled for a second to get her legs back under herself, and when she stood it was near catastrophe until she centered her gravity and took a deep breath. It was released slowly, and as it was her shoulders squared and her head was held a wee bit higher. Though disheveled and downright gritty, she turned to face the Ensign, "Patch them through." A hand came up to silence the protest she could feel bubbling within Merlin, "I insist."

There was a nod, and the flicker of a screen. The Ambassador looked aghast as he took in the condition of their regent, shocked as the little woman correctly identified herself in their native tongue and stood, stifling a hysterical coughing fit, as she listened to him. There was the explanation that she was safe, that her guard was feared gone and perished - that she hadn't been returned to her quarters to check on anyone else. From there came word that there was no sign of a hull breach that any of her retinue's sensors had picked up. This had been an incident in the belly of the ship, deep in her heart... And so far it had failed to do much more than cause discomfort.

"It's an old station, Highness, they were fools to build on top rather than start from scratch."

"You'll hold your tongue." The conversation switched back to Standard, with Xue's ire flashing in her glassy eyes, "We will render aid. Send our finest engineers and quickly. I'm staying here until Si'a Dai'xun is recovered, one way..." She breathed, trying desperately not to cough or display the shaking shivers that had settled into her exhausted limbs, "Or another." A motion was given to kill the com and from there she floated back towards the seat Merlin had deposited her into, her gait impinged by the missing shoe and burnt bottom of her foot. "You will have help soon." She nodded, her shoulders shaking as her lungs would wait no longer for a chance to clear themselves of whatever particulates had settled within.

As soon as the channel cut, Merlin was there to help her settle in again. He produced a thin blanket from a silken-like material out of seeming nowhere and tucked it in around her, as well as two slim, flat packages. "Heat packs. Try to rest, medical staff ought to be here soon. Oh, and I do believe we did have one section that vented atmosphere, but containment fields in that area did spring up quickly, thank the stars for small blessings." He smiled fleetingly and brushed a soot-stained strand of hair out of her face. Once again there was that sensation of time slowing, coming almost to a standstill. "We'll do everything we can to find your missing retinue… You made it up here, so who knows what other small miracles we can still get." His hand rested on her forehead, moved down to her cheek, her chin. "Please rest," he whispered, and his sea-coloured eyes were fixed on hers, light blue and green and midnight blue with hints of purple, enormous eyes, eyes to drown in, calm and restful and deep. "Sleep…"

"Ev..." Xue tried to gather herself to protest, to demand... Something. Just as swiftly as the desire had risen, it had fallen - and with it went her desire to remain awake. Those eyes, fathoms deep, were the last thing she remembered as the echo of his voice began to subside and sleep, indeed, reigned supreme. Warm. Bundled in a blanket. Under watchful eyes, Xue'Daio allowed herself to rest and begin to heal.

In that moment beyond time, the weird Lieutenant's hands closed around the small, frail hands of the Empress. Her glow was gone, extinguished by fatigue and pain, but – had anyone been able to notice – his hands glowed now, as they had done only once before. And where that glow enveloped her hands, the burns and blisters disappeared, the skin became smooth and whole again. Driven purely by instinct, beyond the Lieutenants will or control, his hands moved on, stroked knees which also had been red and blistered, removed a singular shoe, brushed past cuts and burns on the soles of her feet.

There was only one thought driving him at this point, a thought which seemed wholly unremarkable at the time but which he would often take out and examine, later. He didn't want to lose someone so dear to him… again.

And then the moment was gone, and time resumed its normal flow, and the Lieutenant rose, turned his back on the sleeping woman, and became an XO in the middle of a crisis once more.

Empress Xue'Daio Nox
Queen of Apsha
Ruler of Aleine
Stenellian Ascendancy

&

Lieutenant Merlin
AXO & Chief Strat Ops
Cold Station Theta