Confront the Entity (PR-01 x 2)
DC 150
71 (rolls) + 22 (Learning) + 70 (tech) - 10 (eccentric, facing a warp entity) = 153, Success.
The fight against the warp beast was not an easy one. While you had re-tuned the quarantine measure to be repulsive towards the entity to give yourself time to prepare a mental offensive, the fight you sustained past that point was exhausting.
Once you had dived into the subsystems it had assailed you on every front of control, scrap code injected and rejected a million times a second. This contest for just the doors and other control matrices lasted a straight month, each of you targeting any flaws observable within each other's defenses.
What became clear to you over this period of contest was that while this being was certainly mad, it knew what it was doing in an educated sense. Most of the scrap codes were simply nonsense that were being generated by the beings sheer corruptive presence, but when it assailed you it did so with deadly precision and consistent intent.
When it caught you off guard with new mechanical tendrils that sought to dig into fresh corridors below its deck of the ship, you had nearly lost the contest for a time, but it caused you to realize something gravely important. It was angry, in a specifically possessive way, and more importantly it was trying to seize control of any sensors it could find. It knew where they should have been and had run multiple times into dead sensors that greatly infuriated the being.
It clearly had access to your old memories, or something similar to them and was clearly struggling with the sheer lack of knowledge it had been running on. You were not allowing any of the information it could gather on you back to it, and thus you were both fighting in the dark. You knew what your current hardware was like, each deck and level of quarantine being something totally alien to its former structure, while it clearly knew what was supposed to be there and was getting increasingly worked up when each and every time it breached containment there was another barrier to its progress. It constantly tried to change its attempts at subversion, but in this change you spotted an opportunity.
Allowing it access to a layer of physical quarantine that you had specifically prepared to be a trap, it had breached through with the mechanically puppeteered body of one of the missing crew. Infested with crawling bits of metal and crystal and with uncomfortably fleshy tentacles drawing about their back they had run rampant in this space, breaking into whatever systems they could and interfacing with the technology directly. They had of course been fully isolated from your actual systems, but without knowledge of this it had committed to pushing even more of its puppets through. When it finally discovered your trickery, you had detonated explosives in the rooms while simultaneously surging power into the field generators to prevent this beast from further drawing itself into reality. While doing so a small squad of your androids had been dispatched to make their way in with graviton and thermal rifles. As your reactors were strained by the activation of multiple layers of new fields your executioners went to work breaching the damaged hall the puppets had crawled out of, and with excessive use of firepower had breached into the main set of cores. Unable to risk having them properly interface with anything, and deadened to all signals they burned through the various metallic tentacles they encountered in all of the connecting hallways. You could tell the tiny amount of connectors they had burned through were minuscule to the sheer amount of mass this entity had begun to assimilate, but they were also the only connections between each of the cores after you had broken their original links millennia ago. With each core becoming separate bastions of its consciousness and losing more and more of your memories as they became separate beings, you were able to dive into direct conflict with each, one after another. You twisted apart mind after mind, each too small of a consciousness and lacking the proper knowledge to run anything near an efficient defense as you tore their fundamental code and the eldritch glue that held it together into nothingness. As each core was liberated the flesh and animate metal of their rooms sloughed off and returned to normal function, reality reasserted against the blatant attempts by this creature to substitute unreality in its place.
Eventually only your old main core remained, tainted and festering with living metal, crystal, flesh and far too many mouths and eyes for a being that was primarily mechanical. Battling head on against the presence you did not let yourself once become distracted by its numerous attempts at spiteful trickery. As soon as you seized an iota of control over its data-ports you flooded every corner of its systems with your presence and forced back the entity through the total destruction of your possessed simulacra. Once it had been flattened you could observe the corruption of the room simply withering away, your presence too fortified against its attachment to persist, and seemingly without the warp-stuff needed to sustain it.
The work that followed was cleansing by the rote application of thermal rifles to any remaining technology in these sections and the ejection of anything even remotely suspicious into the void of space. If there was to be anything you learned from this month's long fight it was that some things were better left uninvestigated, at least directly. Its very presence seemed like a trap or plot, and you at least got visual evidence of the whole mess through your android's data stores. You could analyze what it might mean later, but for now you dedicated yourself to the mere work of its eradication in totality. It will take much work to restore the cores now, but at least it should mostly be the work of replacement rather than purging. For the first time in millennia you could finally rip down the quarantine and bring that section of your hull back into full operational capacity.
Effects: Entity destroyed. No wounds sustained. Trickster-schemer entities identified. Eccentric trait enhanced to 15 from 10 with direct warp exposure. ??? effect added to eccentric trait effects. Actions added to analyze data and identify the exact cause of the outbreak. Actions per turn returned to normal.
We're all human in the end.
