That’s a smart fish

There are so many files here to dig through, but at least they seem detailed enough. It’s hard to think that right now Penny and I would be digging through a bunch of reports with the crew after what went down last night.

I had just taken the stroll from the Siren’s Song down to Kael’s lab, hoping to check on how Penny was doing. When I got there, she was sitting up and chatting with Cicero. I’ll admit that I wasn’t entirely happy that when she finally came around it was him that was there and not me, but I made a choice and now I gotta live with it. For some reason, Fin was sitting with his back to the tank making balloon animals again. 

Strangely, I don’t even question these things anymore.

Penny seemed well enough and we had just started chatting and I was filling her in on what had been going on when we all heard the strangest sound coming from the tank, right near where Fin was sitting. The kraken was somehow using a glass cutter on the aquarium panel and, based on the sound it was making, the glass was not going to hold for much longer.

I was not about to stick around and find out what would happen next.

At that point, I had shouted out into the comms to let everyone know what was happening, grabbed Penny’s hand, and we ran for the door faster than a hungry Rakk chasing a rabbit. I had assumed everybody would follow but instead the doctor seemed to be trying to work some sort of panel in the corner. Cicero was trying to convince the doctor not to hurt it, and Fin… Well, let’s just say that a psychotic water-breathing kraken-lover was unsurprisingly finding his way into the aquarium through a salmon cannon. If anybody was going to be fine, it was Fin.

When I realized that the others hadn’t followed, I had told Penny to keep going while I went back to get the others. Penny had paused for a moment, and I still wonder if she was trying to think of a way to help the others out or whether she was calculating the odds of knocking me out and dragging me to the door before the kraken got loose.

 It didn’t take much for me to convince the doc to start escaping, and Cicero helped out by pulling more sorcery out of somewhere and suddenly the doctor was flying half-way across the room. Unfortunately for her, she wound up directly in front of the escaping kraken. Both Cicero and Kael made the rush to the door and I slammed it shut as soon as they got through. Fin was going to have to be on his own after that.

Over the comms, Fin was asking for help, but not with the kraken. Apparently he was trying to get some sort of door unlocked and had hoped Zoe could do some hacking wizardry. 

Brute force didn’t work.
Rocket launchers? Didn’t work.
Both the Kraken and Fin working to open the door? Nope.

Even Zoe’s hacking efforts seemed to be backfiring. Side note: we should try to find out who built that door because we need to get one for the ship!

In the hallway, we had a pretty heated discussion about the explody device inside the doctor. According to Cicero, these things can be removed but it takes a lot of luck and another host to keep it from going boom. There weren’t many options, so I offered my arm. I knew we needed everybody to be moving out of here and more talk wasn’t going to get the doctor out of harm’s way. Penny probably still isn’t happy about that, but luckily for her Cicero refused to do it. 

It was then that we heard the glass break from the other room. You could hear the rushing of water as it spilled out all over the lab along with the slapping sounds of a Kraken flailing about. We couldn’t see what was happening from the other side of the door, bu it seemed like Kael and Cicero had started planning to put the explody thing in the kraken. Luckily for the kraken, at that very  moment Zoe hacked through the aquarium doors.

With a way to the sea opened, and with a little “help” from Fin, the two swam off, best of friends. That did mean no option for transferring the bomb, but on the bright side it meant the doctor didn’t have to escape this minute. We had bought ourselves some time.

And a chance to sleep.

The investigation begins

After the evening’s entertainment, apparently brought to us by Fin, we had all grouped up back at the Siren’s Song to talk over the options we had for the next day. There were a lot of ideas, but not a lot of agreeing on actually doing anything. I’ve heard some say there are no bad ideas, but they would be mighty wrong.

I’m still not sure that trying to get any of that oil is a good idea. I know that Min is seeing an easy pay day, but it occurs to me that if it were that easy there’d be a whole lot more of these folks doing it. Something is off here… I think Penny and I, and maybe Cicero since he can detect those brain thingy’s, are going to need to chat with some of the locals.

Just a few hours ago, we woke up and went to meet up with Beauregard and Dubois.

 Ahem, Harbormaster General Beauregard. 

This time, Min did what needed doing to get the contract done. Initial offer was only 200K, which is good for us based on past jobs but as Min rightly pointed out it is hardly the sort of sum that matches up to the costs to the Jakobs corp of doing nothing. It seems Fin and Min somehow found the right words because Beauregard is now offering up 5 million credits. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that kind of pay day. I do not like how much this is worth to the Jakobs corp. If things go south we might find somebody like me tracking us down.

After the money talk  is when we got the info from Dubois and his team. Now this is important, so Log, please make a bookmark here for me to come back to later today. 

• The maintenance windows for the affected New U’s are twice a month, using various intervals. There is a short interval where the lights flicker for maintenance, and that’s the only time we would have to check it.
• Maintenance is done remotely from a galaxy-wide broadcast from the headquarters
• Deliveries and assembly of New-U stations are done by droids deployed from a drone ship
• The rate of the psychosis has been confirmed to be higher with those that have been through a New-U…. Although, in my opinion, this could be one of those times when what the computer says might be missing some context. I mean, seems pretty likely those  with psychosis naturally go through New-U systems more often.

We also have a lot of files on the personnel, maps of the kraken fishing area, full schematics of the factories, and the locations of the New-U stations where kraken hunters are brought back. It’s a lot more than I hoped, honestly.

It’s time to dig up some clues on what’s going on here with the New-U systems. This part of the mystery is always my favourite!

Image credit:

• Cover image: “Kraken” by YunaXD, from their DeviantArt (Sourced from: DeviantArt image)