-[X] Epiyon Frontier
A region of the Southern Reaches that has only been recently settled by the Empire, it is also the home of the planet Sanskrit; the very place your Father found you. The local colonies are underdeveloped, and are often the victim of pirates. The data says that this is the least likely location to find the God Vessel, but something in your gut says that if it exists, it will be here.
--[X] File a public flight plan (if such things are done) heading for the "Nebula" destination and then change course midway there to the Frontier. We know there's political issues surrounding our existence and that there are people who want to see us fail. Giving them a known destination is just asking for "pirates" of some sort to drop in on us.
Even if the ship isn't here it's still almost a certainty that something will be.
-[X] Epiyon Frontier
--[X] File a public flight plan (if such things are done) heading for the "Nebula" destination and then change course midway there to the Frontier. We know there's political issues surrounding our existence and that there are people who want to see us fail. Giving them a known destination is just asking for "pirates" of some sort to drop in on us.
It takes all of your willpower not to fidget as the scanner passes over you, leaving a tingling sensation across your entire body.
Supposedly the green light can hurt a Dagenruff's eyes, but you've never had that problem, only the sensation of something crawling under your epidermis. Which is honestly unfair because there's no other species that get the sensation. Which is just extra sucky here within Hellscape, because you can feel the things outside the ship being the only available distraction with their love and curiosity-
You squeeze your eyes shut and take a deep breath, carefully refocusing on the scanner as it makes one more sweep before the light finally turns off and opens up. The shell retracts into the sides of the bed with a soft hum, leaving you to blink at the bright lights of the medical bay. "Scan is complete, you can get up now."
You do so carefully, your bare skin peeling uncomfortably off the ceramic covering. The first time you had done this during a Hellscape jump you'd just immediately sat up and had to deal with the feeling of losing said bits of skin for nearly a week afterwards. Which was yet another thing that had left you jealous of your fellow classmates. Thanks to their fur they didn't have to worry about sticking to the scanner's table.
Also the cold.
"Alright, now if you could look up and straight at me…" KN-DRP1, your vessel's medical officer, settles down in front of you with a small light. "…Fascinating. Your pupils dilate faster than any I've seen. And… are your eyes glowing?"
You blink at the question before turning away with a blush. "It's a psychic phenomena. My psionic abilities are what cause it."
"But isn't that normally restricted to when in active use? Or are you…"
"I'm not scanning anyone!" you immediately deny, waving your hands in front of you. "I swear I have my psionics in a passive state! It's just…" You degrade into mumbling towards the end, fingers twisting together as you awkwardly shuffle in place.
"I… didn't hear that last bit?" KN-DRP1 asks with a knowing smile.
"…My eyes glow because my psionics required them to rebuild the scale," you finally grumble. "I'm the standing benchmark for class eighteen psionic potential, with the likelihood of going even higher as my body continues to mature. Current theory is that my species figured out how to intentionally induce psionic abilities in organics and control the magnitude of the results. How, I don't know; it wasn't in the database I have in my brain."
KN-DRP1 simply hums at that as she finishes noting something down on her datapad. "That is alright, but I will say now that you have to be extra careful. Powerful psionics are dangerous while traveling the Hellscape."
"You and every medical officer I've ever told," you reply wryly, "Which is why I'm usually doing something if I can. Easier to ignore the Entities that way, though on larger civilian liners the higher concentrations of Dagenruff can drown them out."
"If that's the case, then I suggest spending time down on the crew deck," KN-DRP1 suggested. She scratched at one of her floppy ears before nodding. "Alright, that should be everything. Thank you for coming, Captain. Though I do wish we had an actual baseline to use with you. It'd make watching your health much easier."
"You and me both," you agree, before pushing off the scanner table so you could get dressed. "It'd also free up some space on my personal data pad so I wouldn't have to carry a copy of all the research surrounding me along on trips like these." Which you had to do for the simple fact of expediency. You know for a fact that the medical facilities across the Empire shared data constantly, but when making Hellscape jumps the simple lack of knowledge on whatever you were required periodic checkups to make sure nothing untoward was interacting with your psionics and drawing the attention of Entities.
Which, if you were being honest, was actually the reason you hated making Hellscape jumps even though you loved ships and travelling. The Hellscape was originally known as Jump Space when it was first discovered, thousands of years ago at the dawn of the Empire. But after a while ships began going missing during jumps, so those scientists so long ago did the natural thing and tried to figure out what was making those vessels go missing. Problem was, all that had managed to do was make even more ships go missing.
It wasn't until the famous jump of the TT-9b "Victim" that the Empire and the rest of the galaxy finally figured out why ships would simply vanish in Jump Space. And that was because there were Things that lived there. And those things loved us.
Which was the problem.
Simply entering, traversing, and exiting the Hellscape was fine. But if someone got curious and started looking out into the infinite featureless void of black, then the Hellscape Entities would take notice of the vessel because of an individual's mind touching upon the darkness. And being ever curious and eager, the Entities would then seek to interact with those new minds, which would lead to them interacting with the vessel that mind was on.
The Victim managed to exit Hellscape right as one of those Entities noticed it, which led to all but a tiny handful of individuals being slaughtered, either due to the deleterious effects reality had on things native to Hellscape, or in self defense by the survivors. Either way, none of the survivors remained sane after the jump and Jump Space was eventually rechristened into Hellscape as a permanent reminder of the dangers of looking out.
Which was far harder for psions like you who can feel the curiosity and love being directed to everything around the minds they were coming from and…
You glance out a window of your ship as you feel something move in the darkness outside.
[] [It Loves You] Try to find it.
[] [It Loves You] Ignore it.
"Want to know what bothers me the most about Hellscape jumps?" AD-331 asks as he spots you at the weight set.
"Hn?" You pause just long enough to adjust your sweaty grip before returning to your squats.
"The fact we're outside of time. Like…" You hear him shiver, the sound of his fur ruffling betraying the motion.. "Everyone knows every hundred lightyears takes a day in real space, but apparently we don't age while we're in here? We are literally experiencing movement through time, and can exercise to be healthy and grow stronger, but when we get to where we're going we're not even a day older? How does that even work?"
"Hrn, most, hrn, popular theory, hrn, is that it's, hrn, a psychic phenomena, hrn, like glowing eyes."
"So psionics can fuck with time?"
You pause for a moment as you think that over before shrugging, "Powerful psions are known to be able to create stasis fields that are assumed to freeze things in time temporarily, since nothing can interact with stuff in those fields." You step back so you can rest your barbell on it's gantry. "Popular opinion is that we're subjected to a different set of physics while in Hellscape, under which we're technically immortal."
"If it wasn't for the dangers, I can see people trying to stay in Hellscape all the time."
"No, even with the dangers, people tried that. But those same dangers are the reason no one else has." You both share a chuckle at your joke. "Anyway, I need to get to the bridge. We're to arrive in less than an hour."
"Understood ma'am." AD-331 rolls his shoulders, giving you an amazing view of his chest muscles collectively rippling. "I need another twenty minutes to satisfy my exercise requirements before I can join you."
And by your Ancestors do you want to stay and watch. You can grind meat on those abs. (Something you know for a fact, because his room at the Academy was right across from yours and you were able to watch a lot through that window.) "Right…" You swallow heavily. "I'll see you then." And hopefully not in the showers, because you need a cold one.
The featureless Hellscape splits open with a scream of disturbed reality that echoes through your vessel's hull. The much more comforting darkness and speckled light of real space greeting the Lost Cause at the end of it's voyage. As your ship transitions through the veil between realities you can almost hear the mournful cries of the Entities you leave behind as the hole closes behind your engines.
"Cross referencing our star maps… data confirms we are currently in high orbit over the colony world of Sanskrit. Local ping has the time as a week after our departure and 23:00 at our destination."
"Is the spaceport functional yet?"
"No ma'am. Colonial Command asks that we use our own shuttles and set down in the ruins. Their spaceport is still little more than gravity lift right now and they don't get enough traffic through here to dictate flight paths."
You nod to yourself as your communications officer finishes their relay. "Understood, tell Marine Groups F and G to suit up and meet me in the shuttle bay."
"You sure?" AD-331 asks from his position near the navigator's console. "That's against regulations."
"I'm sure," you sigh as you push off from the hololyth you had been leaning against. "Regulations didn't take into account that this is my mission and I'm the only one on this ship capable of reading the Builder's Words. So I'll have to go down whether we like it or not." You march to the hallway that connects the bridge to the central tram, "AD-331, you have the helm while I'm on the surface. Don't crash my ship."
"Whatever you say, Captain."
You retrain the urge to reply once more as the door closes.
Sanskrit is a young colony, at barely three decades old at most. There are no real resources to speak of, and the amount of arable farmland is restricted to a tiny spot on the smallest of its three continents.
What it does have though, what made the Empire decide to actually settle it, is a vast complex of Builder Ruins. A titanic mega-city that stretched across the two uninhabitable continents and made any plant growth up there virtually impossible. Every few years expeditions from the Core Worlds would come out to dig up another section of the city in an effort to find something, but most of those had ended in failure… until your father had found you.
Now it's up to you to find something else.
The dark blue-grey Empire drop ship carefully… ok yeah, you can't think that with a straight face. The angry metal brick dropped out of the sky to slam down in the middle of what looks to be a courtyard with a bang loud enough to wake the dead. It's gravity lift engines were not quite up to the task of landing with any kind of delicacy, or to avoid crushing whatever had been underneath it. It also causes a spike of discomfort up your spine as well, but that's less of an issue.
KL grunts in annoyance as you step off your transport. "So, where do we start?"
"This is where my Father landed during his own expedition. If we follow the map they made, we'll find where he found me. They weren't able to get a lot off the Capsule, but chances are there'll be some form of data storage nearby we can access."
"Sounds as good a plan as any. Let's form up and get moving people!"
The Builder ruins are an off-color grey with red streaks of what you assume to be signs of oxidation everywhere. Whatever metal they used wasn't Adamantium as far as you can tell, but after fifty thousand years without a caretaker it's still holding up better than anything else you can think of.
As you move through the seemingly too-narrow corridors, an unfamiliar feeling of homesickness overtakes you. Almost as if the ruins themselves are sad you have to see them like this.
"Is it just me, or are the passages way too small?" The Marine at the front grunts out in annoyance. "Seriously, I've nearly hit my head twice in the last three minutes." As funny as the complaint is, it isn't an exaggeration. A Dagenruff in full armor was close to ten feet tall, meaning the otherwise seven foot doorways forced your entire escort to periodically duck under them, and in two cases abort standing up immediately by some sign that was so worn as to be unreadable sitting at the same height.
"Hey Morev, anything in your head explaining why Builders made the walkways inside their structures so small?" KL asks from behind you, using a hand to brace against one of the doorways to keep her own balance.
"Considering I haven't had any issues myself, it might be because they were simply that small." You raise an arm to wave an armored gauntlet over your head in demonstration. Your own combat skin adds another two feet onto your height much like your companions, but even the extra two feet only just brought you high enough to scrape against the top of the doorframes, making moving through the short hallways only marginally inconvenient. "Everyone assumes I'm the only living example of a Builder in the galaxy. So if they were all roughly as tall as I am, then chances are this was slightly large on their scale."
"Slightly large she says," a Marine snarks, "just ignoring the fact this complex covers several square miles all on it's own."
"My Father's palace covers seven. This is normal to me," you snipe back.
You hear something about 'damned nobles', but by then you've stopped listening, because the path finally opens up into a large room with some kind of cylinder in the middle. "... I think this is it. Where my Father found me."
"I think it is," KL agrees.
The room is several meters long, with the previously stated cylinder—the capsule your Father found you within—on one end, where the floor sunk into what looked like a divot of some kind that was lined with work stations and dead consoles. One side of the room was a massive, darkened window that took up the entire wall, while the other was taken up by an open air gap that must have been your Father's exit point for the ruins.
"We have the generators?" you ask as the group as the systems of your suit begin scanning the room, putting up an expected lack of anything to your display.
"Yes ma'am. Anything you'd like us to start up first?"
"See if you can get the workstations running first." You point to the dead consoles in the lowered floor that your former capsule was resting upon. "The rest of us are going to search the room to see if we can find a door or something." With a salute, the soldier does as ordered, while you turn back to the window-wall.
KL comes up behind you. "I sent two pairs back into the hallway to see if they can find a way into this room next to us. That's probably going to take a while. though."
"…True. I want to try something." KL simply looks at you as you raise an arm and focus. Then, with a *snap-hiss* of pseudo-plasma, a glowing blade erupts from the gauntlet of your combat skin. "Psi Blade. I'm not good enough to use it in a fight yet, but there's not a lot that it can't cut through." Bracing yourself with your off hand, you carefully drive your construct into the window and begin to slowly cut a small oval out at chest-height. Roughly seven seconds or so later, the cut-out ceramic you had thought was glass clatters to the floor, allowing you to peek through.
The window-wall was exactly that, a bare window that acted as a wall allowing the other room to view the room with your capsule without interruption. It is also littered with small piles of corpse dust.
"KL, call your Marines back and have everyone seal their suits. I'm cutting this wall open."
"Ma'am!" The black Dagenruff turns away to start barking orders as you take two steps to the right to start your action again, this time tearing a hole large enough for you and your guards to make it through. "Guards through the hole first, Captain." You grunt in annoyance, but acquiesce to the demand.
Once through though, the new room is rapidly scanned and catalogued as well as… "Is this what I think it is?"
"Looks like a backup generator. But why is there one here?"
"Chances are it's for an emergency situation if whatever experiment they were running on me went awry," you comment off-handedly as you inspect it. "What I want to know is if it still works…" And in order to facilitate such, you mentally dig up the vast library of knowledge stuck in your brain to see if any of the provided blueprints matched… which, while none did, one was similar enough that you were able to identify what you were pretty certain was a switch to turn it on. "I'm going to try turning it on, everyone be alert. If it does work, there's no telling what it'll activate."
Your Marines take position throughout the room, and you flip the switch.
The machine rumbles to life, and screens throughout the room flicker to life. "Ma'am, the other team's reporting power has started workstations in the other room along with your capsule," KL comments from the doorway.
"Tell them to start getting what they can off the computers, I'm…" Something suddenly changes in the room and a new voice is suddenly speaking from one of the consoles.
"Project 10, Log… eighty. The Patricide Program is definitely on it's way to completion. The ship is already complete and is now waiting on it's future… Captain to finish gestating. I've sent several complaints about what we're doing, but there's been no response from Terra Command. Chances are they're already gone, and the universe isn't going to remember the atrocity I've committed here anyway. Creating new life for no other reason to be a breeding mare for our new weapon… it bothers me. The others have agreed that we're going to do more than just that. We're going to make her an actual Captain. Not some organic interface that High Command will use to control the thing they made us build. It'll delay completion by a few years, but at the rate everything else in the galaxy is going to hell, it's not like it'll matter. So long as she's born and we get her to the super-dreadnought, we win."
The message cuts out at that, whatever other data that should have been there, lost to time and degradation of the machines that had held it. Frowning in confusion, you place a hand on the table that held the workstation you had just listened to. "…Think they were talking about me?"
"No idea," KL huffs. "Unlike you, we didn't understand everything they said."
"Whoever it was… they said something about turning their experiment into a proper Captain instead of a breeding mare. It's…" More than a little disturbing to think about. As far as everyone was able to get from Builder ruins across the galaxy they had been a bright and loving people. For something to happen to require them to do this… "The 'super-dreadnought' though… I'm positive it's the God Vessel. This facility was connected to it, like my Father thought."
"Then what purpose were you supposed to fill?" KL immediately asks. "The God Vessel was a starship. This is a ground-based science facility with no drydocks of any kind for prototype ships."
"... Organic Interface. If the file is correct I was originally meant to be the thing they controlled the God Vessel with. How exactly were they expecting that to work, and why would they need it?"
"This is confusing." KL sighs in irritation. "Ships are that; ships. Even if you plug an AI into it, controlling it is as simple as choosing what consoles control one thing or another."
"What if…" one of the Marines awkwardly speaks up, drawing your and KL's combined attention. He shuffles awkwardly for a moment before gathering enough courage to continue. "What if, what they built isn't just a ship? We… The Empire calls it the God Vessel for a reason ,don't we? Then that means someone must have stumbled across it's specifications somewhere and chose to give it that designation for a reason."
"That's a good point," you agree. Frowning, you raise a hand to the blank faceplate that covers yours. "How powerful is something that even the early Empire, who didn't even call the Builders 'God' would dub the 'God Vessel'? Especially with pre-existing examples of Builder ships?"
It's a good question. Sadly though, a screech from deeper in the complex cuts any continued speculation short. "What was that?!" One of the Marines cries as everyone except you draws guns.
"…That was a Beast cry," you announce, causing everyone to go still enough to seem dead. "Everyone, time to pack it up! Get the Lost Cause on the horn!" It takes a moment to realise you're screaming, but no one can or will fault you for it. "Have them alert the colony! Start evacuations ASAP!"
Back in the capsule room, the Marines you had left pulling data from the newly powered stations are shoving everything they can back into the carry cases, unheeding of the potential damage to the electronics being abused. "Move it people, fifteen seconds, we leave behind everything not in its case!" KL shouts, just as another keening screech echoes from the walls around you. "Go, go, go!"
Three portable stations are inevitably left behind as the other seven are lifted onto the backs of your Marines. Immediately they duck low and begin a mad sprint down the paths you had come from, with you towards the front and as many of them between you and the coming danger as they could without putting you all the way into the front and risking something ambushing you from that direction.
It is this formation that saves your life as the first Beast tears through a wall, spiked appendages spear the Marine in front like his armor is foam, ripping him apart even as it drags him and the portable station he had been carrying back through the sudden hole. You don't pause, you don't stop as one hand snatches a detonator from a compartment in your armor, primes it, and chucks it through the hole where he is still screaming.
Ten feet down the hall later, the detonator blows and his screams are drowned out by the high-energy plasma that incinerates him and the thing that had been eating him alive.
<"Lost Cause to ground team, we just got your alert beacon, the hell is going on down there?">
"Contact with Beast Assault Forms! We're retreating through the Science Facility to our landing point." KL raises her pulse rifle just long enough to fire a handful of quick shots down a side corridor as she passes it, triggering the rest of the group to do the same, earning squeals of rage and pain from whatever she saw. "Ping the Colony, and begin an evacuation, then alert the nearest patrol! We need containment!"
<"Shit, understood, just focus on getting the fuck out of there. Lost Cause out.">
And you do. The screams of the creatures hound you and yours for the entire mile and a half to the courtyard that you had landed in. Twice more, they erupt from the walls to steal one of your group, just to be left behind with a plasma grenade that erases the men and monster both, the only mercy you can offer.
Out in the courtyard itself, both drop ships are already warmed up and hovering off the ground, the heat of their rockets setting fire to the Beasts that were literally climbing on top of their own dead in an effort to reach them. And for a moment, the world seems to slow down to your eyes. Between one moment and the next, your own pulse rifle is unfolded from its place on your armored thigh and in your hands.
Drlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrlrl!!!!
The sound is deceptively soft to your ears. As if some part of you believed the armor-puncturing energy pulses should have been louder. But they're not, and it means nothing as they tear through the horde of Beasts between you and escape.
"Onto the ships!" Armor thrusters fire, launching your group of survivors through the air towards the drop ship's open troop bays, KL at your side. The both of you collide with each other on landing. In the time it takes you to clamber back to your feet, a Beast has leapt up after you and is in the troop hold.
You empty half of your rifle's clip into it, screaming in rage as it's scythe-limbs flash.
Then its corpse is falling out of the dropship, and the remaining survivors of your Marine group leap in after it. One runs past to pound on the door sealing off the cockpit to shout for take off, but you can't hear what he says. No. Your eyes and ears are focused on KL.
KL, your friend, who has a massive gash through her armor. Her red blood, streaming from the wound, is streaked with black. An obvious infection.
Your rifle snaps up, but you freeze, unable to pull the trigger.
KL can't shoot herself, the wound is across her spine and her arms are paralyzed. None of the other Marines have their guns out and those that do are empty. KL's life is in your hands.
The right thing to do is to pull the trigger. To gun your oldest friend down here and now. But your entire being screams at you that this is wrong, that you can save her. But how? How do you save someone from themselves? Save someone from their body turning against them, to be twisted into a weapon meant to exterminate life?
You could drag her back with you to the Lost Cause. The medical bay has stasis pods, but what kind of solution is that? The Empire doesn't have the technology to cure someone of Beasthood. Throwing her into that pod would be sentencing her to being a ticking time bomb that only needs someone to let her out.
<"Captain, this is Lost Cause, we have a situation here! The closest patrol is three days out and the Colony is being attacked by Beast Assault Forms! There's still innocent people down there trying to evacuate, but they're not going to make it to the starport and we've got signs of Beast-infected ships preparing to take off! We need orders!">
Hell won't wait for you, it seems. Even as KL bleeds out in front of you, slowly turning into a cosmic horror, the world below you is becoming a killing ground. Lost Cause has Marines, even if you've lost seven of your original twelve (you refuse to declare KL lost yet), but you don't have nearly enough to wage a ground war. You could send them, potentially losing even more, and still not save all of the remaining civilians… and risk jump-capable ships leaving the planet.
Or you could bite the bullet and order the Lost Cause to open fire. Condemn those civilians to a horrific death by conflagration or consumption and ensure the rest of the Galaxy will be safe from the Infection.
You have two choices to make.
Will you kill your oldest friend? Will you let a colony full of innocents damn a hundred more worlds?
Once infected, you can't be saved. Entire worlds have been lost because someone got sympathetic at the wrong time. One life for thousands on your ship. The math is simple.
[] [KL-0909090909] Save Her
The Lost Cause has a medical bay. In the thousands of years the Empire has known about the Beasts, no one has ever found a way to save it's victims. But you're not just anyone. You have records from one of the Galaxy's most advanced species to ever exist locked in your brain. If anyone can save her, you can. You have to.
[] [KL-0909090909] Lock Her Away
You refuse. KL is your oldest and dearest friend. No one has ever found a cure… but that's only among the known races of the galaxy. The Builders were older and wiser than everyone else could fathom. And you were searching for quite possibly the greatest of their works ever conceived. There's a chance, however slim, that you could find a way to save her there.
Risk the Beasts getting their claws on a Hellscape ship, but save as many civilians as you can. Those people are innocents that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[] [Colony] Glass the Colony
You can't help anyone down there. Even a small infection could mean the Beasts spreading and taking a ship to infect other colonies. And if the infection here grows large enough to spawn or build its own space vessels, then you'll have an Empire-wide threat to deal with.
Due to the nature of the current vote, I'm placing a 6 hour moratorium on the voting. Which means no voting until
. That way everyone can converse about what action to take without having the pressure of "everyone's voting this, shit!" sending them somewhere before they can think about it.
No. Nope. Fuck this choice. FTL here is literally a Hellscape. We shouldn't be touching this shit even with a ten-foot-pole and a Gloriana-class battleship's worth of the local equivalent to Gellar fields.
[] [KL-0909090909] Pull The Trigger
Once infected, you can't be saved. Entire worlds have been lost because someone got sympathetic at the wrong time. One life for thousands on your ship. The math is simple.
[] [KL-0909090909] Save Her
The Lost Cause has a medical bay. In the thousands of years the Empire has known about the Beasts, no one has ever found a way to save it's victims. But you're not just anyone. You have records from one of the Galaxy's most advanced species to ever exist locked in your brain. If anyone can save her, you can. You have to.
[] [KL-0909090909] Lock Her Away
You refuse. KL is your oldest and dearest friend. No one has ever found a cure… but that's only among the known races of the galaxy. The Builders were older and wiser than everyone else could fathom. And you were searching for quite possibly the greatest of their works ever conceived. There's a chance, however slim, that you could find a way to save her there.
So this is probably the best option in my opinion for a number of reasons. One of the first is The Consequences when word inevitably gets out. Just having KL alive in this condition is likely enough to earn an immediate "purge order" from any responsible authority. They're not just responsible for themselves but for potentially billions of people and having an infected on the ship is pretty much like signing our own death warrant regardless of whether they're in stasis or not.
Being able to save KL or not is honestly irrelevant here because regardless of the outcome,KL will probably be persona non grata at the very best on a galactic scale. People will always harbor fears and suspicions about whether KL was really cured or is actually some sort of sleeper agent.
[] [Colony] Send Drop Ships
Risk the Beasts getting their claws on a Hellscape ship, but save as many civilians as you can. Those people are innocents that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[] [Colony] Glass the Colony
You can't help anyone down there. Even a small infection could mean the Beasts spreading and taking a ship to infect other colonies. And if the infection here grows large enough to spawn or build its own space vessels, then you'll have an Empire-wide threat to deal with.
And here we're faced with the other side of the coin. Can we afford to try and save the people down there? Consequences will be forthcoming regardless of the path we choose but I can see the choice we make here being a tipping point for most future interactions with people of power. Were we the compassionate leader who risked their lives and ship to save the innocent? Or were we the ruthless pragmatist who did what circumstances said was necessary, no matter the cost to us personally?
These two choices are going to set the tone going forward everyone, be careful and think this through.
My personal feeling is, given this is a somewhere between Bloodborne and the Flood, is that trying to save KL on our own is going to go poorly. Putting her in stasis until we find the God Vessel might work, but would be a risk. Killing her is by far the safest option, but probably not great psychologically.
As far as the colony, glassing is really the only viable option, I think. KL is a risk vector, but one we already have contained. IT would be impossible to contain the colony. And death by nuclear incineration may very well be preferable to whatever the Beasts do.
as for the [it loves you] vote... is it bad that I kinda wanna vote to stare back into the void just to see what happens?
I kinda want to stare back at the void, but take the harshly pragmatic approach to the colony here. Kill K-9, glass the colony, stare back into the void and see what we can make of things. The Hellscapers love us, after all!
While this is leaning a bit into metagaming, I feel like keeping her in stasis would be a better option, because it's possible that finding the God Vessel would let us actually cure her. Worst case scenario, we can quietly euthanize her in the stasis chamber instead of just shooting her in the moment. And if we do find the God Vessel, the sheer social shebang this will generate would probably outweigh whatever suspicions people might have.
YO CW, didn't you literally just write that psions could make stasis bubbles? Why ain't we stasising KL? Seems a decent option-- oh I missed that IC explanation, ouch.
