Among Us: Hosts

Ch. 10

That night, Chiedza placed strict orders to not leave the med bay. Regardless, one person had woken up in the middle of the night, and was squirming around for a bit. Prem sat up, the cooled, darkened cabin unable to lull him to sleep.

He looked at the patch he'd been playing around with in his hand. He shrugged off his blanket and put his suit on, and walked out of the room. Glancing back, he checked to see if everyone was in bed. Someone was missing, possibly lurking around the cabin. He checked bed by bed, and surmised it to be Jessica. Prem looked out the hallway, and walked towards navigation slowly.

He spoke into the wrist-piece on his arm, maintaining the logs he'd started since he'd first been on the planet. He heard a rustling sound in the hallway to his right, and paused, standing in total silence.

With a bored look on his face, he continued walking to navigation. In the room, he settled into the comfortable chair at the helm. He tapped his foot on the ground for a bit before leaning forward to open the system's crew information. He first read through the messages, and the ones he didn't have clearance for, he used the Vice Captain patch to override security. He came across a message from Gan that piqued his interest, and he closed his eyes after reading the message.

After some perusing, he moved to look at the crew directory. He used the patch to see all the data the system had on the members. He smirked as he read through everyone's skill sets. He raised his eyebrows when he stopped at Raha's profile, greyed out to display her deceased status. He had on a poker face, and closed the files.
He brought up some scripting for the AI and changed it a bit, knowing it would cause just the right amount of disruption.

After leaving navigation, he looked to both sides to see if he could see or hear anything, or anyone.

He thought he heard a sound on his left, and slowly and silently walked towards it. He looked around, shined a light into communications, but saw no one. He walked through storage and peeked into admin, where he finally saw Jessica working on the circuit board. He walked towards her, when he was startled by someone standing there on his right: Assisi.

He hadn't even noticed her, but she was standing by a wall glaring at him.
"Hi," he motioned to her. She nodded, and Jessica looked up. "Oh Prem, Assisi. Why are you guys still awake?"
"I tried to sleep. Couldn't do it." Assisi responded.
"We're almost halfway done with tasks, so I had to keep working. If we finish the rewiring properly, we can have the AI functionalities back. Should be able to... figure things out quickly at that point. Have you finished your tasks?"

Prem shrugged, and Assisi furrowed her brow. "Why aren't you taking it seriously? Wanna get us all killed? Or is that the plan?"

Prem gave a sad small smile, "What do you think should be more important, Assisi? The journey or the destination?"

When she didn't respond, he continued, "The hunt or the meal?"

Jessica turned to look at Prem in concern, and Assisi blinked and shook her head with a little scoff.
"Let's just go back to bed for now, you two," Jessica closed the panel she was fixing and said.

The three of them walked back to the med bay and curled back into the beds they'd gotten up from earlier in the night. Chiedza, ever the light sleeper, stared ahead at the wall in front of her, lost in her thoughts. She peered at the shadows on the wall to take note of who had left the room.

The next morning, an ambient alarm woke up the crew, who all got cleaned and dressed for another day. They checked discreetly to see if everyone was still there, and moved around largely in silence.

They had a quick debriefing where Jessica explained to the whole crew that completing their tasks would result in the AI rewiring properly to detect the imposter.
It didn't seem to motivate anyone other than Chiedza, who was clearly trying very hard to keep the six of them motivated.

The cafeteria doors opened, and everyone headed off to their own work.

Jessica picked up a sandwich from the vending machine and walked down the west hallway towards the reactor and engines. She walked past Chiedza and Chantelle, and made her way to the bottom of the lower engines.
She stood by a rotor for aligning the engine when she heard a clicking sound behind her, coming from the dark hallway. Jessica turned and stared. A pair of eyes slowly peered from the hallway, and Jessica immediately reached forward and pulled out a gun from the wall that they kept for emergencies.

She pointed it as the figure emerged fully.

"Whoa, whoa. You're not allowed to shoot that. There's no code red." Matias slinked forward in his brown suit, hands up in front of him.
Jessica didn't put the gun away.

"Calm down, Jessica, I just wanted to talk. We're friends, right?"
Jessica's hands shook. "Not particularly?"
"Come on... of course we are. Don't you trust me? You're violating so many rules pointing that at me."

Jessica chewed her lip.
"I'm not gonna hurt you. Are you gonna hurt me?" Matias said, his face growing more serious.

Jessica looked back at the hallway she came from. No one was around to see her pointing this gun at him. She turned and docked the gun back into the panel she took it from.

"There. Now you're being reasonable."
Matias walked towards her slowly. With every step he took, she shuffled backwards a bit, until her back hit the side of the lower engine. No one could see anything that happened in this corner.

Jessica gulped and closed her eyes, waiting for whatever may come. Matias slumped against the wall opposite Jessica.

"You know, if they find out about that gun, they're going to eject you next." He told her, and she opened her eyes again.
He smiled, "But I'll keep it a secret. We're friends after all."
She blinked a few times and looked away.

"While we're at it, I'll tell you a little secret of my own."