[Battle complete]

(Gottlieb) has killed:

(Gottlieb) has killed (Elder Vampire{LVL 22})(Elder Vampire{LVL 23})

You got [3500/3500] EXP ! *+~- [LEVEL UP!] -~+* You are now level 15! You got [566/4750] EXP ! [You have {1} attribute points to apply] [You have {1} ability points to apply] GOTTLIEB Level: 15 Experience: 566/4750 Class: Orbital Gunner Sub-class: None Race: Human Home: The orbital-weapons platform [Currently moving to continent {3}] STRENGTH: 19 [+] DEXTERITY: (7) [+] INTELLIGENCE: 8 [+] WISDOM: (7) [+] LOVE: (7) [+] LUCK: 9 [+] [Raised STRENGTH +1](To 20) {0 Attribute Points remaining}

New Ability - [Ranking {4}]

Allows you to open all doors on the station that are marked with a clearance level of {4}.

Gottlieb swipes away the menus, before looking around medical. He hadn’t ever really looked at medical. It was behind a rank three door. Somehow, he had simply missed it. Then again, apart from the goblin and the vampire, there just isn’t a lot of interesting stuff here for him. There are a bunch of weird medications and syringes and stuff, but nothing that he really feels a deep need to play around with.

The man lifts his gaze towards the blue light, shining above his head, staring at it for a while.

Gottlieb looks back down towards a metal drawer and pulls it open, rummaging around its contents. Inside of it is a roll of medical-tape and a pair of scissors. He smiles.

“Sucks to be you, Kai,” says Gottlieb. He cuts off a piece of the tape and then walks over to the blue-light, covering it up so that Kai can’t constantly watch him. It makes them even, in depriving the other of what they enjoy most in life.

The station has a lot of cameras. But that’s fine.

He has a lot of tape.

Gottlieb hands the roll down to Grunheide, who is still somewhat dazed from her therapy session. Although, she doesn’t look like she’s been bitten by the vampire. “Congratulations,” says Gottlieb. “You’re on snipping duty.”

“Grun?” asks the goblin.

Gottlieb nods. “Yup. You.” He makes a cutting motion with his fingers. She looks at him and then back down to the tape and the scissors in her hands and then cuts a piece off, handing it up to him.

Gottlieb nods, sticking the piece of tape to his finger.

He nods his head to the side, gesturing for her to follow him.

To get to Kai’s core, they’re going to need to go through the maintenance passage. He can imagine that Kai has shut that off entirely, using an array of sophisticated security measures that work even under low-power conditions.

But there are likely several things that Gottlieb would assume Kai hasn’t prepared for.

“Boy. I sure do love having legs and not being a stupid robot-ghost,” says Gottlieb, stretching upwards to tape over another camera. He’s lost track of which one this is. Although it feels like it could be the hundredth one so far, easily. They’ve been at it for a while and the cameras are absolutely everywhere. He isn’t really sure why the military decided to throw this many cameras into the station, unless they were running a secret reality-show here, but it’s a huge pain in the ass to cover them all up.

He nods, content and knocks on the latest concealed camera for emphasis.

The man stops, thinking for a moment.

“Hey, do you have a camera?” he asks, looking at Grunheide.

“Uh… nix,” she replies.

“I figured,” says Gottlieb, shaking his head. “Too bad. I was thinking that I should take a picture of my ass and hang it in front of Kai’s last camera.” He sighs. “Oh well. A man can dream.”

— Something rattles in the darkness, down the corridor.

Gottlieb leans back, peeking through the open door to security, towards where the sound came from.

He lifts an eyebrow.

“…Really, Kai?” asks Gottlieb, knowing that, even if Kai can’t see them, that he can hear them. “Have you really fallen this low?”

A single skeleton with creaky, rattly bones wanders down the corridor towards them. It does its best to look particularly menacing, but it isn’t really effective. “You could have at least given it a knife or something,” says Gottlieb, looking at the single monster’s empty hand.

Hand, singular. It’s missing an arm.

Kai must really be trying to stretch the budget thin here. This is just sad.

“Hey,” says Gottlieb, looking at Grunheide. “Go kill it.” She points at herself, looking at him. He nods. “Yeah, you.”

She points at herself. “Gun.”

“Uh, no?” replies Gottlieb. “Shooting the gun is my job. You just had a one-off,” he explains. “You’re the auxiliary gunner. Your job is to sit there while I do my job.”

“Gun!” she argues.

Gottlieb leans in towards her. “No gun. The gun is mine.”

The goblin stamps her foot. “Gun!”

Gottlieb narrows his eyes. Perhaps he has to get down to her level for her to get it. He points at himself. “GUN!”

“GUN!” she yells back.

— Bones creak behind them.

Oh, right.

Gottlieb turns his head to look at the single skeleton that stands just a few feet away from them both.

It points at its own bony, hollow chest, where a printed note hangs, having been stuck there with a piece of tape. There is only a single sentence on the sheet of paper.

‘Orbital Gunner Gottlieb’s love life’

“Wow. Very cute, Kai,” says Gottlieb. “I didn’t know we were doing postcards now. Maybe I’ll go get that camera after all.”

The skeleton crumbles together, falling into a heap of bones and dust.

Very impressive.

Gottlieb shakes his head, looking at what was once the one-armed skeleton. Although, he does wonder why it had only one arm? Surely it can’t have been that much harder for Kai to make a full skeleton?

— Grunheide pulls on his leg.

“No gun!” barks Gottlieb.

She points down the corridor, towards the door to the lab.

A bony arm hangs there on the mechanism to release the emergency seal. “…Kai. You wouldn’t,” says Gottlieb.

— The skeleton arm hits the emergency release, following its last order, before falling down, as dead as one would hope any individual part of a skeleton would be.

The door hisses and before it can even rise up an inch, already a massive blob of steaming, toxic ooze presses itself out beneath the crack.

Well. Shit.

The ooze turns their way, seeing them before Gottlieb has the chance to hide. “Father!” yells the blob, not sounding too distressed about his prior abandonments of it.

“Gun?” asks Grunheide.

“NO G-” starts Gottlieb, before looking her way. “- Oooh,” he says, realizing what she has been talking about this whole time.

She’s pointing at the cabinets in security that store ammunition for the rifle. It’s almost empty, after all of the zombies. But, the great tragedy here is that he has left the rifle, the gun, downstairs. He thought she was talking about the orbital cannon.

— Not that it would help against the ooze anyways.

“FATHER!” yells the ooze. Gottlieb turns his head, looking in horror as the toxic mass of sludge that has somehow grown even larger than before, presses itself fully out into the corridor. A face emerges from its mass, a flat, squishy representation of something trying to appear human. Its eyes shine in childlike wonder and glee as they stare at him in what he can only confusingly describe as awe. Soft, long, gooey arms reach out for him as it crawls, as it sloshes along the floor in eager excitement to get to him.

Gottlieb hastily grabs a box of bullets for the rifle and stuffs them into his pocket, losing a few as he grabs Grunheide and then immediately runs the other way, looping around the corridor.

The sound of sloshing and of excited, confused cries comes from behind them the entire time.

“Ah?” asks Grunheide, looking his way as they run.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” yells Gottlieb at her, as they round the bend.

Part two of his plan to stick it to Kai requires going through the airlock, to do something about the solar-panels that feed the station energy. But only something temporary. He needs them for the orbital gun, after all.

But this won’t work. The only way to get outside is through the airlock and he isn’t one-hundred percent confident that Kai can’t just lock those behind him, even in a low-power situation like this.

Instead, he needs a plan B. Thankfully, he already has one.

Gottlieb rummages around the walls, looking for something. The two of them are in cryo.

He finds it. A long, thick, corded cable. It’s a power cable, just like the one he had found Grunheide chewing on when they met. He nods his head to her, holding the cable out to her.

“Here. Chew on this for… I dunno. Fifteen minutes,” says Gottlieb. “Just long enough for me to take a leak and get back.”

“Uh?” she asks, taking the cable and looking at him.

“You’ll be fine. You survived last time, right?” he says. “I just need you to get Kai off the air for a while.” He looks up towards the taped up light above his head. “Hear that, buddy?” asks Gottlieb. “I’m coming for a visit.”

A howling mass makes its way around the bend.

Shit.

How did it find them? Gottlieb was sure that they lost it in the corridors.

“…Fa- father?” asks the monster, looking around the room. There isn’t a way out anymore. Cryo only has one door and the entrance to the showers, which is a dead-end. The ooze’s voice has changed. It seems… less excited now. It almost seems sad.

Gottlieb groans. Why does life have to be like this?

He looks at the creature, at the blob. Despite being a disgusting, horrible, toxic monstrosity, it is his, after all. Its face looks lost and confused. It looks like a child, having been separated from its parents at the park. It has gone through the effort to not only give itself a face like a human’s, but also it now has strands of gooey hair too, as if it thought it only needed to upgrade its appearance, to look prettier and more like him, to get him to like and accept it.

Gottlieb takes a deep breath. This bites.

The ooze turns their way, seeing them. Grunheide lifts her hands and steps away to the side, getting out of the way.

The man sighs, looking at the monster, at the creature, made entirely out of poison slime. They lock eyes.

“…Father…” says the ooze. But it’s different now. It’s more subdued, less hopeful. It seems to have taken note of his many rejections of it and they seem to have left deeper scars.

Gottlieb, knowing what he has to do now, purses his lips and kneels down on one knee. He softly holds out his hands, waving in towards himself with his fingers, nodding only once to affirm his remaining presence. The ooze looks his way, staring at him for a moment as, presumably, many things run through its, through her, head.

“It’s okay,” reassures Gottlieb. “It was wrong of me to run. But I’m here now.”

“Father?” asks the ooze, pulling herself upright, her eyes growing wide and bright as she studies him, a kindling hope having been returned to her spirit.

Gottlieb shakes his head, watching as the entity slowly approaches him. “No,” says the man. The wet hand that had been carefully, tenderly, stretching itself out to touch him, stops. He looks at the ooze. “— You can call me papa.”

“— PAPA!” cries the ooze, her eyes welling with goo as she lunges forward for a hug.

Gottlieb dives to the side.

The ooze falls straight past him and into the open cryo-tube that he was standing in front of.

Gottlieb immediately jumps up to his feet and smashes down on the big, red ‘seal’ button on the tube’s exterior.

The lid slams shut, trapping the ooze inside. A tormented face turns around, pressing itself against the little viewing window, staring into his eyes with an expression he can’t really understand. It’s an expression that goes deeper than feelings and faces, both fleshy and gooey — It’s a look that comes from the soul.

It freezes solid.

It’s a good thing that these cryo-tubes run self-sufficiently, to stop people from unthawing incorrectly in an emergency.

Gottlieb stands there, his hands on his hips. The man sucks his teeth, listening as Grunheide walks his way from the side.

“— Not gonna talk about it.”

“Ah,” she replies. There is a snipping sound and she hands him up a piece of tape.

“Thanks,” says Gottlieb, plastering it over the viewing window into the cryo-tube. Gottlieb nods his head back to the cable. “Chew. I have a date with Kai.”

“Ah,” repeats Grunheide, shrugging and taking the cable into her hands.