Star Trek: Foothold - To Relieve Paine

Dance Hall

She, again, briefly considered trying the other exits before the door she'd been prompted to take, but ruled it out: the game was going to react to her and steer her where she was wanted no matter what she did, and how she got there would be detailed by whatever it rolled out for her to stumble over. The less work she made the program do to feed her an experience, the more likely it was to be robust enough to keep her entertained. Being as she did not know what it held in store either way, she decided to let it take her where it would.

The door to the East Hall was labelled 'Accounts and Ledgers', and had a simple iron-wrought doorknob with a key lock in the handle. It was locked, and Paine frowned sternly at it, twisting hard until it snapped off in her hand, falling apart on both sides of the door. Reaching a finger into the hole left behind she tugged on the mechanism and the door swung open, where she left it to hang. Stepping through the door into the hallway she found an empty security booth with shattered glass all over the desk and floor, leaving a badly warped wire mesh as the remnant of its former security. A bloody corpse occupied the room behind the mesh, and a back door was broken beyond use behind her, a ruined filing cabinet toppled against it in a vain effort to keep whatever had gotten her out.

A quick scout convinced her that it would be more effort than it was worth to get in and investigate, but she was surprised to see something interesting in a divot in the counter which would have been used to pass small objects under the security glass. It was a small sphere of cloudy crystal, looking very much like an opal with shifting colours and shapes in its dimly lit depths. Intrigued, she picked up the sphere and turned it around in her hand, bringing it up to inspect with her darkened eye. Looking closely, she could see images shifting in the stone, playing out a silent scene. Curiouser and curiouser... with no further insight, she pocketed the device and turned to head down the hall carefully, uncertain what she might encounter.

There was a sound somewhere ahead that she couldn't quite make out: it was irregular, strangely wet sounding, and now and then she could hear clicks and snaps. 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 meat hook grasp. Interesting.