Star Trek: Foothold - To Relieve Paine

In For the Long Hall

As such, she pulled on the handle of the foreshadowed door, and it swung easily, silently on its hinges to let her through. She noted as it did that the façade was a plate of some sturdy metal which fit the door frame with a significant overlap that would make it quite difficult to kick through from the lobby, and a large bracket on the other side suggested that it could be fitted with a bar that would keep it from being pried open easily as well, even if the two-inch deadbolts failed. Very secure; and yet they still fell.

The hall behind the door was a study in disarray: the lights beyond the lobby didn't seem to work, with one or two along the hall flickering in a moot effort to try and catch light, instead lending more to the sense of destruction. Filing cabinets which had been stored against one wall had been tipped over, drawers spilling out like gutted behemoths. Machines of unclear purpose had been pulled out of alcoves and ruined, left smouldering and sparking, filling the air with an acrid stench that dominated the atmosphere, and which Paine assumed had driven the Uruk away from the hall itself. Several doors along the hall were clearly inaccessible, some of them having been savaged in an effort to break into rooms beyond, or out of rooms beyond, mangling the doors in their frames so that they would clearly not work. The only thing she could see from the door that stood out from the general destruction was the shadowy outline of a person sitting at the far end of the hall, lit periodically in the flickering light, and looking almost as good as the rest of the hall.

Bracing herself for what she might be walking into in the darkness beyond, Paine stepped through the door, and let it swing closed behind her. Immediately she regretted not bracing it as she heard the deadbolts slide into place, and knew without looking that she would not be able to retract them from here. The hallway flickered and smoked ahead of her, and she moved to take a step forward, but paused, remembering that her weapon was no longer serviceable. For some reason it made her more comfortable to call up her interface panels on surfaces, possibly because it kept her view clear, so she turned to the blank wall on one side and began going through her menus.

The hilt of Nothung was still in her grip, empty of a blade to bear its influence, and she considered her situation while selecting a replacement: the hall was narrow and fraught with debris and obstacles, and there was no real expectation that things would open up beyond immediately, so she'd want something that would favour close quarters combat. While her overall preference leaned towards a two-handed major blade, such as a claymore or zweihander, this situation would make such a choice into a significant liability. Flicking through her low-grade pile of loot, she considered whether or not there might be something worth crafting from the mess instead. Her skills were still incredibly low, given the opportunities to grind through some of the experience, so her options were few, although the butcher's cleaver was available to craft from what she had on hand.

Before she could select it, however, something interesting caught her eye a couple of options down, and she scrolled in to consider how that might play out. A few minutes and failed crafts later, luck and experience sided with her, and she was soon fitting a gruesome looking hooked sickle into Nothung's grip to bolster its improved stats. She considered the interesting ways the hooked weapon would impact her fighting style over the cleaver, and whether the system adjusted ingrained skills for those circumstances, certain that she'd soon find out. The most interesting initial observation was that when she combined the hook with Nothung, it came with two configurations which could be adjusted quite easily with a moment of focused attention—so, not in the middle of a pitched battle, at least not easily—that would change the grip from the standard sickle grip to a horizontal meathook grasp. Interesting.

She started down the hallway with the meathook in her grip. Initially her eyes stayed focused on the body at the far end, but instinct in the form of a Passenger prompt made her start sweeping as she moved instead, checking under the cabinets before climbing overtop. Her weight unsettled them further while she made her way across, but they were tall enough that they didn't fully collapse, but the back panels crumpled under booted feet. When she stepped down off the far side and considered what it would be like to have to backtrack while being attacked, she didn't relish the idea of having to retreat this way.