sixthiterationlogs | [MINGLE] PLOT: Down the Tubes: Alarm

[MINGLE] PLOT: Down the Tubes: Alarm

WHERE: The bunker & elsewhere
WHEN: 1 September 2018
OPEN TO: ALL - MINGLE
WARNINGS: Please warn on threads
NOTES: Plot Details | Bunker Details | Bunker Map & Key
Threads may take place ANYTIME during the plot, including before, during and after the tubes have been opened, just please do not godmod tube arrivals without explicit permission. Related threads not in the bunker are welcomed, as are general bunker exploration/reaction threads that have nothing to do with the arrivals. Please reference the bunker key doc for what is and isn't available to explore at present.

Deep under the mountain, tucked away in the newly-discovered bunker complex, there is a room where everyone begins. It is filled with equipment — Computer consoles, monitors — but the point of it all resides within ten vertical stasis tubes lined neatly along a far wall.

One of them has been cracked and lies dormant, dry. In six of the remaining are bodies, unconscious and floating in their familiar vari-colored scrubs, vital signs ticking calmly off on their respective readouts.

In the corner, near the cracked tube, the ceiling has shattered and tumbled inward, across the floor and over the largest console in the room — The one flashing 24 HOURS UNTIL STASIS FAILURE.

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After they'd found the room, Peggy had taken herself out of the pack in order to drift into the newly discovered room with a fair share of wariness. She can't say that she's averse to experimentation given what she'd worked on during the war, but this isn't like anything she's seen before and more than that, it's been hidden away. It's just another example of this place thoroughly messing with their minds.

She sees the broken tube first, but her attention drifts to the others as she wanders to them, looking past the fluid to see ...

"Oh, god," Peggy exhales, the words pushed out of her chest. There are people in there and something is going terribly wrong. The control panel is talking about stasis failure and Peggy might not be a whiz in technology, but she knows enough to know that's not good. She looks around the room, intending to break open the pods, but she has a feeling that it might be better to try and work the system. The only trouble is, she can't do that alone.

"I need help!" she shouts, trying to get anyone's attention who might have come down in search of the signals. "Anyone, please!"

Jess isn't down there to help anyone, she's just there to stay out of the way and fill her waking hours. After allowing for Kamala to nearly drown herself by trying to take care of everyone (two kids) at the same time, she's the least qualified responder in an emergency situation. So she hung back, avoided the crowd, took in the big details they already did and soaking up a few smaller ones. Part of her is looking for the jukebox, just to validate her suspicion of it from the beginning.

At the first call for help, she freezes, her ears straining for footfalls as someone else comes running to answer. Nobody does. Jess sighs when beseeched again, by a semi-familiar voice, and trots towards it.

Her mouth falls agape as she enters the room, then seals grimly as it occurs to her that these are the potential victims of the countdown, not any of them. Jesus Christ. Swallowing, she turns her attention to Peggy, who seems present and focused despite reality and the building crumbling around them. "How do we get these open?"

Peggy's relief shows in her eyes when someone from the future arrives. She's been trying to smash and work open the tubes, but that doesn't seem like the brightest of ideas and though she's been pressing buttons with the system, she's at a loss as to what it wants from her. "I think it has something to do with this," she says, gesturing for Jessica to look at the screen.

"We've got a day, but a day to do what, I have no bloody idea," she snaps, her frustration showing as she feels her control over the situation beginning to bleed away from her.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay. Jess catalogs the situation, noting the semi-familiar tech accompanying the screens and the absence of manual overrides on the tubes. No big red stickers or black exclamation points or IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, PULL HERE, which is technology that goddamn buses have but the point is, the lead looks to be the computers.

"Not be here," Jess posits, crossing to a console to see how they can go about giving these people the same choice. Aside from Peggy's scrub colour and general air of hyper capability, Jess recalls a third(!) thing about her: She's from a time when computers were the size of a small building. Or made entirely of wood. "Do you mind if I cut in?"

Peggy's been working to find something to start unhooking and try to make the bloody things work, but she needs Samberly or another of the tech team, so when Jessica asks to help, she gestures towards the screens. "Yes, please," is her blunt request, relieved that it looks like she won't have to go this alone.

"Tell me how I can help," she says. "Or if you find out what any of this means."

"Find something heavy and start smashing?" is her suggestion, and it's clearly that, not an order. Taking charge of everything just because you know how computers work is how you get a crater full of Starkbots. This is so backwards, this is the opposite of what she came down here for. Jess fools herself into focusing by convincing herself the interface has to be fairly simple for the tech savvy. Because otherwise they're all fucked and she's going to walk into the forest and wait for the wendigos to get her.

After a couple of wrong buttons, Jess gets the screen to react in some way: The countdown minimizes to a quarter of its size and tucks itself into the corner of the screen. The rest fills with a list of errors relating to abbreviations Jess isn't familiar with, they could be peoples' names or shorthand for molecular levels. "Oh-kay..." She taps into the first, which populates the screen with a cloud of red text technobabble that ends in SYSTEM REBOOT REQUIRED but there are no pages branching further from that.

Growling at the screen, "How do I reboot the goddamn system?"

Oh, would Peggy love to be able to smash her way through this particular problem, but seeing as there are people in there, she doesn't think taking a heavy object to a machine she doesn't understand will end up being a good idea. After all, who knows what it might do to them. She hates the creeping, crawling feeling in the back of her neck that feels like a mounting frustration she can't shake.

It means that she doesn't know how to solve this problem and she hates that. "What does it say?" Peggy asks, finally drawing herself away from staring at the tubes to help with the computers. "Does it want something to reboot? A key?" she asks, manning the station and running her hands over it to see if she can't find something.

"Probably," she says through gritted teeth, backing out to the previous screen and tapping into the next item on the list, which brings up the same gobbledygook and the same request. Returning to the top menu, she scrolls down until she hits a dead end. Then she scrolls up and lo and behold, at the top of the list she didn't know they'd been plunked in the middle of, an option for systems control.

Entering that, the first option in capitalized blinking text is MASTER REBOOT like "I was over here the whole time, dummy!" Upon selecting it, Peggy's theory is confirmed. A window that overtakes most of the screen asks REBOOT ALL SYSTEMS? but won't take yes for an answer, providing a blank box for the password it insists they have.

Regarding Peggy, "You've been here a while, right? Any ideas?"

She has been here a very long time and she wracks her brain to think of all the things she's seen that don't make sense. She'd brought one of the notebooks with her, somewhere where she's kept notes on the people in the village and absent things that she's seen. Instead of searching for a physical key, she looks at the screen.

Password, it wants a password.

"There were fish, once, with messages inside," she rambles, skimming her finger over the notes on the page that describe that, recalling how they'd found coins and messages. Inside. She looks up sharply and catches Jessica's gaze.

"Inside the wendigo," she says. "There was something inside the wendigo, wasn't there?" What did they do with it? She closes her eyes tightly and looks to Jessica. "It was a message or something, it had something inside it." She knows that many people brought items with them, did they bring that?

Peggy glances around and catches Jessica's eye. "It was a cylinder type item, I think. We need to find it, it had something inside."

The hell? After hearing it, Jess replays the key points in her head and it's no less incomprehensible. Even removing fish from the equation. But with the firing of the exact right synapses, she links it to a mention by someone at the party that creature's body was retrieved for examination. If she'd been on her game, she'd have looked into it and would have that password right now, but she forgot about it in the hurricane of a hangover that ensued.

"Okay, well, I suck at people." Jess's hands slip from the console and she backs a step away. "You ask around, I'll check that pile of crap they brought down." It's evident from her tone that she's certain Peggy's getting the lead. Jess doubts she'll find some magic Da Vinci code device among a couple boxes of basic supplies and that should circumvent any glory or gratitude, if they manage to reboot the friggin' system. No skin off her nose.

Peggy gives a sharp nod of her head, heading off as quickly as she can. She knows that this is all a crazy idea that they're following, but no crazier than some of the other things they've endured in their time here. Her conversations with others are short and brief things, but they lead her right back to Jessica, so perhaps it had worked.

She gestures to the pile of things. "That one, there," she says, because she'd been told by others that they had brought over a whole slew of items, but the cylinder is the one they want. "It apparently has instructions inside that didn't make sense to anyone at the time."

Funny how Peggy imagines they'll have meaning now.

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[MINGLE] PLOT: Down the Tubes: Alarm

Peggy Carter | Status: Stasis Failure

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