bakerstreet | XENOMORPH TIME AGAIN

IN SPACE, NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU MEME

Sure we've got your fun interplanetary romps, your space spaghetti westerns, your xenoromance. This is none of those things. This is you getting lost in the depths of space. This is you being stuck in a silent hulking dead ship with no idea where to turn. This is you hiding in the dark and hoping the creature doesn't see you. This is you, surviving some kind of horrors. Or not. Do your best.

THREAT

• YOU HAVE MY SYMPATHIES Xenomorphs, facehuggers, necromorphs, predators, whatever: the threat you're up against is some kind of being you've never seen before. Perhaps they're engineered somehow, perhaps they've evolved this way. Either way, I hope you can figure out how to kill them before they kill you.
• I'M AFRAID I CAN'T DO THAT Why the hell did we think building un-tethered AI was a good idea? Your threat is an android, or a ship's AI, or I don't know, a sentient race of evil ships that want to destroy all life and suck it into tubes to make a weird baby shaped ship. WHATEVER. The point is, technology is going against you. Can you beat out something with that much processing power? Maybe having bigger firepower will help.
• I LOVE... ROCKS Your threat is environmental. An exploding sun, an alien planet with an inhospitable atmosphere, your ship's life support systems have failed, your shuttle has gone down in flames. Can you cobble together some way to fix the problem before you all die?
• THIS IS NOT A RESCUE SHIP Screw the other problems, what you're up against are HUMANS. Or, you know, whatever species/race matches yours. We're not xeno-racist here. Anyway, you're being targeted by your own. Maybe you're in the way of a scientific development, or you've become expendable, or they want to take over your ship, or they're just plain evil.
• ABOUT 15 SECONDS Holy shit. Holy... shit. You were outside your ship making repairs and you got knocked off track. Maybe your fancy magnetic boots failed. Maybe some debris from your ship took you down with it. Either way, your space walk has become a space "holy shit help I'm going to get spaced, someone get me back on board." Try not to panic.
• WE'RE THE ENEMIES You've been out in space too long. Everything is going strange and everything is a threat. Is your space sickness psychological or physiological? Is it spreading? Is there a cure?

LOCATIONS

• PLANETSIDE Crash landed. In an outpost. Building a new life. You're on a planet not your own and things are going horribly wrong. What can you do when you have no way home?
• STATION SWEET STATION Whether you're out in your ship or in a streamlined space station, things are rotten in Denmark. You'd better fix that circuitry before you all die. Just a suggestion.
• THE GAPING MAW There's nothing around you and all you can hear is your breathing. Are you calm? Panicked? What's it like floating in the vast expanse of space?
• IT'S INEVITABLE You're lost in your own head. You can be anywhere, but maybe you're the threat because you've short-circuited from being in space too long. The mind can only take so much. Try to be gentle. Try to breathe. No one's after you, it's all in your head.

As always, these are just suggestions. Also, not all examples are strictly hard sci-fi but we do what we want in these parts. Make up anything you want, as long as you're having fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

((Courier. Psi-mutant.))

[ ship prefs | permissions ]

( i went for space zombies lmk if if it doesn't work/if i need to edit anything! )

[ it’s a quiet journey at first, one that’s isolated and heavy with silence permeated only but the constant whir of machinery around him. the cost to board a vessel headed to a new colony, well, it isn’t cheap. especially since this is the first colonist ship to head to a newly discovered planet, where the first colonists will get first dibs on the land and sort out who amongst themselves is going to hold power.

earth is no longer an option. it’s now a dead husk of a planet, bled dry of it’s resources, and blanketed with an atmosphere that’s corrosive at best. as the planet decayed, so did society— social order rotted from the inside out, and those left on earth now either thrive on the chaos or have no way to claw themselves out of it. and where chaos has it’s appeal, there’s nothing that tethers him strongly to the planet, and at base he doesn’t want to die there.

so it became either get enough cash to secure a ride on the next ship with a course off-planet, or somehow sneak himself on board, which hadn’t been as much of an ordeal as he expected. it was simple to hide himself among the throng of people eager to board, slip in unnoticed, and instead of heading to a cabin he had went down to the ship’s engine and had settled himself in for a long ride. the boiler room is the best name for where he holes himself up, the temperature is high, and he doesn’t have room to stretch but it could be worse. he eats the rations he’d shoved into his backpack, carves tallies into the metal plated wall to mark the days, the knife he’d brought screeching something awful as it tears through the plating but there’s no one around to hear it.

he knows something is wrong when the whirring stops and the circuitry dies around him. the pipes above him seem to shudder, clang before going completely silent. it lasts for a minute the silence, before there’s screaming. so loud that it carries to where he is, and he swears, runs a hand through his hair trying to sort out what his next move is. the ship has obviously stopped, something is going on in the upper levels, and whatever it is can’t be good. but there’s nothing to be gained by sitting and waiting where he is, he’s going to run out of supplies, and there’s a kind of tension in him already from being cooped up in one space for too long and what he can hear ( yelling, screaming, gunshots ) from the ventilation isn’t doing much to help.

he climbs the shaft he took to get down to the engine room, and emerges in one of the ship corridors to a sight uglier than anything he’s seen on earth. there are bodies everywhere, strewn on the ground, some of them more whole than others, and blood painted on chrome walls. he eventually finds someone alive still, but barely, slumped down against a wall and a hole in his stomach to tell him a mangled version of what happened. he makes out the words ‘parasite, blood fever, don’t trust anyone’ before the guy chokes on the blood coming up his throat and slumps over.

fuck, is what he thinks, as he backs up from the guy and tries not to step into a puddle of guts. this isn’t what he signed up for. he still has his backpack, and his knife, and he takes a rifle from a dead guard he finds in another hallway. he doesn’t know the layout of the ship, but he assumes there’s a clinic somewhere, a place with supplies that he can barricade himself into.

the next couple hours find him wandering the upper levels of the ship, sneaking past the infected that are too busy stuffing themselves with entrails to take notice of him, and taking out the ones that do notice him with his knife. he doesn’t want to draw a pack of them out with a gunshot.

he’s starting to think that he’s the only non-infected person on the ship, when he rounds a corner only to find someone standing on the other end of the corridor. someone not slumping, or groaning, or throwing themselves at him with their mouth open impossibly wide.

he knows what he looks like, a kid with a gun, blood on his clothes, a little wild around the edges as he raises his rifle at points it at the stranger: ] Hands up where I can see them.

[ If Jason is on the lookout for signs of blood fever and wary about trusting anyone, there's a good chance the man he sees is a prime candidate for a bullet. He's almost wild-looking, with long hair matted in places by blood, gore and carnage splattering along a sleeveless white tank-top and scrub bottoms. He's barefoot, wide-eyed, and most importantly he's got a metal fucking arm. Through the edges of the fabric around his shoulders, gnarly scars can be seen where flesh meets metal.

Beyond that, he's got a knife in his hands that he noticeably doesn't drop when faced with the business end of a rifle.

For a long, tense moment he doesn't move despite the order. Gradually, carefully, those hands come up with knife in his palm and a grim line around his mouth.

He says nothing. ]