A passive humming surrounds him as he walks. The constant droning of electrical components of the station interrupted only by the sound of his boots striking against the metal floors.

The blue light blinks in front of his face as Gottlieb stands there in the hallway, staring up towards it, before lowering his gaze back to the metal door in front of himself. A crude ‘one’ has been painted on it, like with the observatory door. He’s sure this was never there before though.

The door hisses, opening as Kai lets him into the room. Personal storage.

With the station being a cramped thing, there of course isn’t room for everyone to have personal space, except for the captain. But each of them was given exactly one breadbox’s worth of storage here for any personal items.

It’s a small room, hardly more than a big closet. But about fifty locked, sliding doors, close off just as many soda-can height shelves. Each of them is labeled with a printed sticker of a name.

He walks along the row, until he gets to his and grabs the door, sliding it open. The lock releases, revealing…

- Nothing.

Not that he had expected anything. Gottlieb never put anything inside of his storage unit. He didn’t really have anything to take up with himself to space.

The man turns his head, grabbing the next one, belonging to a man named Velmont. It doesn’t budge. Kai doesn’t open it for him.

“Kai,” says Gottlieb. “He’s dead. Let me look,” he tells the blue light on the side of the room. The door doesn’t budge. Gottlieb sighs, rubbing his forehead, thinking for a second. “Kai. I’m worried that we have a spy on board,” says Gottlieb, making something up on the spot. “For the sake of my mental stability, I need to check the lockers to be sure that nobody is hiding anything.”

The door clicks beneath his hand.

In a way, Gottlieb is sure that, if Kai is capable of such a thing, that the entity doesn’t buy that excuse in the least. But, one way or another, Kai is bound to the rules of the station and has to follow them.

Gottlieb slides open the door, looking inside. He recalls Velmont working in solar. Though he couldn’t say for the life of himself what he actually did there.

The little box is crammed full of things. Fabric of an old, colorful, thin blanket, a large box of multivitamins, some old papers.

Gottlieb shrugs, opening the next one and then the next one. He works his way through the lockers, going through all of them, taking out the things that could help him survive. “Kai. I’m confiscating these items to present to the captain as evidence,” lies the man as he makes a stack of things by the door.

He reaches for another locker, his hand stopping in front of it for a moment as he reads the sticker.

- Richter.

The man stares at it for a second, frozen. But then his fingers move, grabbing the handle and he slides it open.

Gottlieb walks through the station, a little glum. Hoisted over his shoulder is an old, long-sleeved t-shirt that he has folded and tied into a bag of sorts, in which he stores his plunder.

The station hums and Gottlieb stands there, in the middle of the main intersection, looking all around himself down the long, empty hallways.

It’s just… quiet.

There’s no reason for it, as far as he can tell, but the hairs on his neck stand on end. He doesn’t like being here. He doesn’t like being alone in a place like this. Sure, he knows that the station is safe. It has to be. But being isolated in a big place like this, a place made out of cold metal and humming machines, isolated in this cold, lifeless vacuum, it feels… frightening.

Gottlieb shakes his head, snapping himself out of it as he keeps walking, heading towards security. Maybe he really should ask Kai for some counseling after all? Space has a way of making people weird, after a while.

He had just grabbed his evening rations from the mess hall, packing them away too.

Now, the man stands there, in front of the next door, the makeshift bag at his feet. “Kai. Come on,” he pleads. “It’s for my mental health,” says Gottlieb.

Kai doesn’t respond and the door to security, marked with a large ‘two’, doesn’t open.

He was hoping to take a look at the cameras to just examine the entire station from Kai’s view of the world. Sure, he doesn’t expect to see anybody else here. But maybe the cameras will help him see something useful? Maybe they’ll help him develop a survival strategy?

Also, there are weapons in security. Mostly stun-guns, but also a few real rifles.

One could argue that firing off a rifle inside of a fragile, enclosed metal canister in space is a terrible idea. That would, in fact, be a very solid argument to make. But the station has a few of them nonetheless, in case of a mutiny or an incursion by enemy forces.

How exactly someone was supposed to invade this place from down below, is of course, a mystery to him. But the military, for all of its reputation, doesn’t care about questions like that.

Does he actually need a rifle? No.

Will having it make him feel better?

Gottlieb looks around the empty hallways. He knows that he’s alone here. But…

- Yes, yes it will. He’d like to just have one, just to feel safer. But maybe he really is being silly. It’s been a lot of stress and he hasn’t really slept since it all started. Hell, now that he thinks about it, it hasn’t even been a full day.

…Has it?

Gottlieb blinks, very suddenly noticing how tired he is. His eyes wander up towards the digital clock on the side of the corridor.

It’s late. Well past midnight. He didn’t even notice.

The man sighs, looking at the door, which stays locked, as he grabs his bag of treasures and heads towards cryo to go to sleep. He doesn’t get far though, stopping again in the same large intersection as before. Gottlieb turns his head to the left, looking at the door to cryo at the end of the corridor for a while, before turning back straight ahead and walking to the tube.

The thought of locking himself in cryo, in a tube where he can’t react to the world around himself is… unnerving in a way that it wasn’t before, when there were others here. What if he gets stuck in the cryo-chamber again? And this, with nobody around to get him out?

Gottlieb jumps into the tube, grabbing hold of the pole and pulling himself down through it, down into the gunner’s bay, where he feels the safest.

He heads to his seat, throwing the bag down on top of it and spares an idle glance towards the monitor for a second. It’s full of Kai’s responses to his messages during his excursion.

[Request Accepted]

Success.

- Unlocking personal storage containers

- Reporting incident to captain

- Suspected espionage. Reporting to security services

[Reprimand issued]

Orbital Gunner Gottlieb - Inappropriate workplace behavior

Context: (Littering; Failure to return tray to counter)

- Notifying the captain

[Request Denied]

Failure

- Orbital Gunner Gottlieb does not have the clearance to enter SECURITY

Gottlieb sighs, shaking his head as he sits down. The man digs through his ‘bag’, pulling out the old blanket.

- {Old}(Normal)[Blanket] -

A thin, colorful blanket, hand-woven from coarse, cotton fibers.

Old: Max Durability reduced by 6 Weight: 1.1 kg Durability: 19/19 (25) Value: 048 Obols

He looks at the status window for a moment, still not really understanding it or how it works. But, he supposes that he doesn’t need to understand the laws of the universe. It just is what it is.

The man sits down on his swivel chair, exhaling as he sits there for a moment.

…It’s quiet.

The silence is interrupted by a creaking sound, coming from his chair as he slowly spins around, looking at the long, empty distance between himself and the tube. The station continues to hum. But the hairs on his neck still stand on end for whatever reason. He really needs some sleep. This was all too much for one day.

But…

Gottlieb gets up again, annoyed at himself, walking to the raised platforms where the geo-spatial computers are. He grabs their office chairs, carrying them down with himself and setting them in front of the tube. Then he goes to the other desk on the other platform and grabs those two as well, making a flimsy, low-effort barricade of sorts.

It’s stupid, he knows. He’s a grown man and he’s alone here with Kai. But, if he’s going to sleep outside of cryo, in the middle of an open room, he’d like to at least know that the metaphorical monsters which lived in his closet as a child haven’t been able to follow him into space.

Once the tube is jammed up, he makes his way back to his desk, sitting down on one of the assiest chairs in the whole station, staring up towards the planet moving behind the monitor.

Things suddenly go dark. The sun goes out.

The humming changes, as the back-up electrical systems take over from the battery, the solar-panels having stopped producing voltage.

The world is encased in darkness, its silhouette envisionable only because of the missing shape where the rays of distant starlight don’t reach. Just like last time, the heating system kicks in, a gust of warm air blowing from beneath his desk.

Is the sun dying?

This is, of course, an oddity in and of itself on the same scale as the dimensional shift that brought him here. But it too is one that is out of the scope of his understanding. Maybe he should kill some more things with the gun and try to raise his intelligence? Actually, now that he thinks about it, he should have done that to begin with. That’s his plan for tomorrow then.

Gottlieb sighs, hating himself far more easily now that he is alone, than when he was surrounded by other people to distract himself. People who would make him feel good about himself.

The man covers himself with the old blanket, digging through his bag as he picks out his nutrition bar, green, and sets it to the side to nibble on before he sleeps. His fingers brush something sharp and thin inside of the bag and he stops, his heart feeling heavy as he grasps it and slowly pulls out the thing he had taken from Richter’s locker.

- (Normal)[Richter’s Photograph] - A photograph of a woman. Standing next to her is a man and two children. All of them look very happy together. Weight: 0.12 kg Value: 003 Obols

She had never told him that she was married.

Gottlieb sighs and grabs the photo with both hands, having spontaneously decided to just rip it up. The paper gives way, hissing a little as he starts.

The monitor blinks.

Orbital Gunner Gottlieb

- According to ‘Space Survival Protocols’, §1 p.6. , during non-emergency situations, you are required to sleep a minimum of 6 hours every 24 hours.

Suggestion: Sleep. Failure to do so will result in an issued reprimand and report of misconduct to the captain.

He stares at the screen for a moment and then just gets up, walking to the other chair of the ‘U’ shaped console. Gottlieb sets the photo down there, leaning it back against the rest, so that she can look out of the window together with him.

Gottlieb returns to his own chair, sitting down and covering himself again, kicking up his feet.

“Kai. Wake me up when we get back to the chicken-lady,” he says, looking at the blue light and then towards the photo, next to himself on the other chair. “I want to kill some more goblins. Good night,” says Gottlieb, closing his eyes. He hears the beep of a message appearing on the monitor, but he doesn’t bother to look.

He already knows that Kai is giving him shit for putting his feet up onto the console.

The station continues to hum.