[2026-09-18 11:50:43.932] Starting up round ID 263999. - ------------------------- [2026-09-18 12:21:04.166] PAPER: matrixone/(Vix Corina) wrote to paper: "I limped out of the library and made my way to the brig. A huge reflector surrounded by plasmaglass burned heavy light into the entire area. It felt as though I stepped into a tanning bed. The HoS and two seccies, a human and a Tiziran, turned their heads when I entered, and I could feel them watch how long it took me to reach the lockers. I printed a .38 speed loader and reloaded slowly, having to put the gun under my armpit and slot in the bullets with my good hand. They watched me do it. At last I started to get my sec belt on, and then someone spoke up behind me. - - "Hey!" - - "Hey." - - "What's with your legs? You should get to medical." - - "Yeah I'll get on that." - - "Here, I'll introduce you to the team!" - - I sighed heavily, but turned around. "All right." - - "I'm Phil Channing, and that one's Breaks-The-Knees, and here's our HoS, Emma Bowers!" - - "Vix Corina." I decided not to bring up my military rank, I doubt this would score me any points with these grunts. "This has been quite the shitshow, I ran into the nightmare in arrivals." - - "Yeah! That's what our lamp is for!" Phil yapped on with enthusiasm. I couldn't see his eyes behind the sechud sunglasses he wore. In fact, I could barely smell anything about him, except that his shotgun was loaded to the brim with flechettes. - - "Yeah, I... figured. I also ran into a changeling on the way here." - - "Really! Small world huh!" Our conversation was turning heads from the HoS and the other seccie. Something was very wrong here. - - "Yeah, that's right. Phil, you said?" - - "That sure is what I said! You got a great memory, Vix!" - - "Yeah, I do. Mind if I have a look at your ID?" - - "Not at all! Inspect away!" He grinned. His sunglasses shone in red and black. I reached for the ID that was slotted into the PDA on his hip, but the PDA felt stuck. I pulled on it again. Still stuck. "Having trouble there?" Phil kept on grinning. - - I reached up and tried to take off his glasses. They were stuck, too. - - "I think I know what's going on." - - "Really!" - - "Yeah. I got a pretty good idea." - - The HoS, Emma, started to approach us, but I held up my hand to wait. Somehow, she listened. - - "What's going on here?" Emma asked. - - "Is Phil on the manifest?" I said. - - "He's implanted," she said. - - "I sure am!" said Phil. - - "Stand down," Emma said. She was talking to me. - - I tried to raise my arm to signal HoS Emma to stop, but Phil grabbed my wrist. I opened my mouth to warn her, but I couldn't make a sound. - - Phil's grin stretched to an inhuman size with a squelch, exposing teeth large as piano keys. There was a crack of bone as he turned his head back toward the HoS and unloaded a barrage of flechettes through her skull. The wall behind her got splashed with chunks and flechette embeds, and she jerked back then fell over, headless. - - I yanked my arm out of Phil's grasp, but his arm stretched like rubber. I moved back. He still held onto me, and turned his shotgun in my direction. - - The lizard seccie, Breaks, hissed and drew his baton. I dropped behind a reinforced table. There was a crash that deafened me, and the table warped from the crumple of flechette embeds, but held. The bent bit of table looked like a mountain of a three dimensional map. Phil's hand still gripped me, now extended across the table and down at a right angle. I bit into its rubbery flesh and tore out the joint, then shook his hand off of mine and drew my gun at last. - - *Continued in Sergeant-Officer Corina VI*" [2026-09-18 12:21:47.695] PAPER: matrixone/(Vix Corina) wrote to paper: "Phil's head peeked under the table. It was composed entirely of teeth and two tiny eyes. The barrel of his shotgun peeked along with him. "There you are!" he yelled. - - I blew through his head with my .38. It split open like a flower but he barely staggered. From behind, Breaks cracked Phil over the back with the stun baton, and that made the shotgun twitch as it fired. The spit of flechettes scratched along the floor by my ear, the windblast from the shot strong enough to blow back my hair. I struggled to stand, gripped the table and pulled myself up. Phil's arm, the one whose hand I bit off, warped into a jagged blade and gored into Breaks' chest plate, deep. Breaks dropped his baton and the force of the arm blade drove him to the floor. - - With my hand still on the table's surface for stability, I fired five more times. Five holes opened in Phil's body and he lost his footing like a marionette with its strings cut. Too much of his mass had gotten blown out, and he crumbled under the weight of his own arm blade. - - "See you soon!" said Phil in a strange voice. I could have sworn I saw the vocal chords move within his body, and then a red, glistening worm wriggled out from his throat and fell to the floor with a wet thud. I followed it with my gun's sights, but I knew I was empty. The worm was fast, like a ball thrown across the room. It dropped into a vent slot and disappeared. - - I holstered my .38 and put pressure on Breaks' chest. He bled green. - - The mute toxin still held, and I could barely just grunt into the comms, but the flatline of the HoS would have shown up on medbay's sensors. I kept the pressure and waited. Sure enough, a paramed showed up soon and levered the brig's outer door with the jaws of life. I opened the inner door and let the paramed take over on Breaks and Emma. - - What a mess. I lit a cigarette and checked the lathe, but the interface was locked down by the QM. I dumped out the empty casings from my revolver, and pulled the single emergency bullet I had on the chain with my dogtags. That'd be all the ammo I could get. I loaded it and rotated the cylinder, then holstered the gun. - - As I finished the cigarette, I had the urge to put my last working hand right through a reinforced fucking wall. Shit didn't seem right. HoS in the morgue, another seccie down, and not a scratch on me. But much as I would have liked to continue this train of thought, the reality was that with the HoS out of the picture Ashborn was the last member of command alive and I wasn't keeping him that way from back here. So I got off my ass and limped all the way back to medbay, and my frustration went away as soon as I saw him. - - "Your Tiziran colleague will pull through," Ashborn said. "He's in surgery." - - "Good." - - "I've called the shuttle, so we can get out of here soon. Let's hold out until then. You all right?" - - "Fine. I'll let you work." I would have wanted to talk to him more, but there were a lot of patients in need of his attention and I didn't want to seem needy. He nodded with a soft smile, and turned back to his parameds who brought in another ling husk. I took this moment to memorize the layout of the vents. There was one by the pharmacy, and another in medbay main. I made sure to remember them. - - This would be our last stand, the final minutes until the shuttle, and if Phil and his changelings wanted to wipe the rest of the crew, they'd have to target the medbay. Any moment now. - - A strange smell reached me from one of the patients' rooms. Near odorless, like water, but with a chemical tang. Like Phil, but just different enough. Another changeling? - - I opened the airlock and stepped into the room. An unnaturall buzzing sound reached my ears and I saw the outline of an emaciated humanoid on the other side of a privacy curtain. The black outline had limbs that were too long and too thin, and a massive head. The top of the head opened and two smaller shapes crawled out of it and the buzzing intensified as they took flight, and then I understood. - - *Continued in Sergeant-Officer Corina VII*" [2026-09-18 12:28:25.839] PAPER: matrixone/(Vix Corina) has printed "Sergeant-Officer Corina V" (id: 12310) by Vix Corina from a book management console. [2026-09-18 12:29:26.358] PAPER: matrixone/(Vix Corina) has printed "NT-SS13 Library Brochure" (id: 12309) by Da Jiao-Zi from a book management console.