"I say! It actually worked!" a rugged miner-looking man (F on map) exclaims at the sight of Cillian coming through the door with his lopan in hand.
Another man (S on map), looking like a foreman, but armed with a hunting rifle, holds one hand out to calm everyone and speaks - alternating his glance between Montoya and the others near Cillian.
“I am Shen Mao, the Chief Science Officer of the capitol ship Demetrius, and these men are a part of the ship’s crew.”
“And yes, you could say that we need help.”
“Five years ago, our ship was trapped in Hyperspace, when the wormhole we were traveling to Jupiter in collapsed, flinging us into a strange and timeless dimension. In our ghostly prison, we lost the sense of time, as it seemed to stop passing – we only know that we have been lost these five years, due to the dates on the computers we have set up here in the warehouse – but for us, those five years could have been the blink of an eye, or a million years. We don’t know.”
“But timelessness was a merciful panacea to our plight – perhaps it is what kept up sane all this time, because we found that after a while, we began to slip from each other physically, the same way a ship in Hyperspace exists intangibly from real space. We became ghosts ourselves in our ghostly prison – unable even to interact with each other or our ship. It may even be that we died in the Gatecrash, but that our spirits could not pass on to the afterlife.”
“That was until a few hours ago. For out of this timelessness we were suddenly drawn here, to find ourselves in these bodies. We speculate that the unique nature of this magnetic storm has somehow opened a primitive conduit between real space and where we were trapped. For us, it was like a doorway had suddenly opened and we had a way out. Imagine our surprise to find that we had come into these bodies – like some sort of processing spirit – but then we saw what was happening. Our spirits were being drawn into the bodies of these colonists as they died in the tragedy that caused the current decompression and radiation.”
“But as you can see from the walking dead outside – it was not a perfect fit. As far as we can tell, only the eight of us here managed to keep our own minds in the ‘transfer’. We believe this is due to the Antirad these men, whose bodies we now inhabit, had taken prior to the tragedy. For the others, the radiation-ravaged brains could not support higher function – leaving them to go mad – trapped in a deteriorating, zombie-like shell.”
“So here we are.”
“We are trying to record the frequencies and signature of the electromagnetic storm, so that after it passes, we may be able to duplicate it. And in a more sterile environment, we may be able to free the rest of the trapped souls – bringing them not into the maddening prison of a broken body, but into a fresh and sound cadaver – or better yet, a cloned body. We are confident that it could be done – with results similar to the eight of us!”
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Topic: Did Somebody Say Zombies?!? (Read 231780 times)