Among Us: Hosts

Ch. 16

The four of them talked a bit longer, when they heard the bedtime alarm ring. Nobody budged; it was going to be a long night.

The lights dimmed, and Chantelle told the ship to turn them back on.

"So what do we tell the Major when we're out of hyperjump?" Assisi asked.
"The truth, I suppose," Kandor replied, "I'll take care of it."

Assisi raised an eyebrow, "Why would it be you? The highest rank always speaks to him."
"Assisi, just drop it. Chiedza gave me her patch."

Jessica shared a glance with Chantelle, "She gave you... her patch?"
"Yes. Last time I saw her before Matias got to her, she gave me the patch."

"Don't lie, Kandor," Assisi rolled her eyes. "I can't imagine why she would do that." She reached for the patch.

"Really? You're stooping that low?" Kandor yelled back, pulling it away from her.

"You've done nothing but make it easier for the imposter to kill, Kandor. It doesn't matter what your intentions were. Makes me wonder whether it is you. But unlike you, I'm not gonna make baseless accusations." Assisi tried to snatch it, but Jessica held her back.

"Assisi, calm down. That patch probably wouldn't even work," she said.

"How do you know that?" She asked Jessica.
"The system's locked. I checked after Code 1 was called. We can't change the base trajectory or the member privileges."

"You... tried to change the system operations?" Kandor asked.
"Well, no. I was just trying to see if there was deeper damage done to the system. Also to see if the AI was up yet."

"That's... suspicious."
"Is it, Kandor? Is checking on the well-being of the ship now suspicious? What about the fact that you found Matias? Or the patch you have?" She fired back.

"I checked in admin earlier too. Access has been largely blocked off," Chantelle said, showing them the patch in her hand: The Vice Captain one.

Everyone paused and stared at her. "H-how'd you get that?" Jessica asked.

"Prem... gave it to me," Chantelle responded. "Well, he'd offered it to me earlier. It was on him when I found him — after he'd died."

The other three looked at each other, and Assisi looked like she was itching to get up. She kept glancing at the emergency button, but finally chose not to go press it.

Kandor put a hand to his forehead and leaned forward, his head hanging low, "I can't vote — I trust all of you."

"Well that's amusing, because I don't trust any of you," Chantelle responded.

With just a brief moment to pause, the alarms blared and the cabin turned red with the emergency lights.

"Emergency: Oxygen failure. Emergency: Oxygen failure. Emergency—"

Everyone panicked for just a moment in the spots they were in, before jumping up to run in different directions. Kandor and Jessica headed for the admin room, while Chantelle and Assisi made a beeline for the Oxygen room.

It took only some ten minutes before they fixed the system failure, and they stepped out to go back to the cafeteria. Just as one person from each group took a step out of their respective doors, they heard a loud rumbling as the doors between them shut.

Startled, they took a moment to see if the doors would open, and when they didn't, they all started banging on the other side to be let out. All except one, that is.

With palpable frustration, they split up and ran down the hallways open to them.

Jessica, who was trapped in the cafeteria, turned to see Chantelle standing nearly on the opposite side of it. When she turned to face Jessica, the latter took only one look before turning tail to run towards the med bay. Chantelle wondered if she should follow her, but the door by her end soon opened. She took a look to see that no one was returning to the cafeteria, before palming the patch in her hand and heading down the hallway past Weapons. She had some work to do.

___________________

Random sets of doors kept opening and shutting around the cabin; perhaps calculated, perhaps to throw the crew's senses off.

One crewmate squatted in the security room to check the cameras, but within a moment, the communication network went down. Before they even got to Comms, the network came back up, but the crewmate went ahead regardless to check the room out.

The doors shut before they could leave storage, and the crewmate pounded the door in frustration.

They checked around to make sure they were alone, and sat by the fuel station. The doors reopened, and the crewmate stood back up, wondering if they should follow through and go check communications or not. After a bit of waiting around, they turned to look down the hallway, where the lights flickered.

The crewmate paused to make sure he'd seen correctly. The lights flickered again, before the ones farther away turned off. Then another. As they stared, a figure in the shadows slowly emerged from the hallway, engulfed in the darkness.

The crewmate gulped and stared, as the figure walked closer and closer, light going out behind it just as they came into view. In their very gut instinct of predator and prey, the crewmate knew that this wasn't a friendly face; this was the imposter stalking towards them.

Making the split second decision to turn and run before the doors could close again, the crewmate ran up towards the cafeteria and waited by the emergency button, ready to press it at the slightest movement. But the lights went out one by one, limiting the crewmate's field of vision, until the ship was engulfed in nothing but darkness; the small light on the crewmates' suits illuminating barely a couple of feet around them.

The crewmate in the cafeteria moved even closer to the center table, fingers hovering over the emergency button. "We're screwed."