JP by Elli and Basin (npc by Will)
Aboard the Potemkin (maybe?)
Following the events of TBR#016
773 words

Heaving with emotion and frustration and adrenaline, still freshly processing the nightmare experience that was the holodeck gone wrong, Elli, stumbling into the hall, looked up and sniffed as she spied a familiar figure exiting the armory— the actual armory and not the one in the terrifying semi-dark of emergency red lighting with a giant Troll cave sized Brute locked inside, ripping at the doors with knife-edged claws.

As he exited the room, Daniel had his face almost buried in the PADD he held up to it. It was an old habit of his, born of a life on the farm- having never touched modern technology before entering the academy- to hold the PADD close to his nose while swiping his index finger across the screen. Fussing with the screen or not, his stride was effortless and obviously in auto-pilot as he turned left into the hallway.

Elli ran full speed at the unsuspecting Security officer, bowling into him head first in the chest, and wrapping her arms around him. She started shaking with relieved sobs.

A grunt of surprise escaped him as the small grazerite impacted his bulking frame, stopping him in his tracks. The PADD clattered to the floor, having been knocked away by the collision.

“Bwuh!?” He managed to say as she clung for what seemed like dear life to his torso. “H-hey! What are you-”

“You’re alive, you’re alive and not dead! You flat-lined. There were swarms of larva chewing through you,” Elli continued to blather and shake just as though she’d woken from a terrible nightmare.

Daniel had been tense up until that moment. His natural instincts had called for action, his crewmate was distressed and needed protecting… but as he looked around at the mostly empty hallway, he noticed no flashing red lights; heard no claxon’s call to Red Alert. His racing mind began to slow back to reality as his breathing came back to normal.

“Elli-” Her name almost spilled out of his mouth before he shut it. He’d completely forgotten he was speaking to his superior. “Lieutenant, I mean. Uh… what… are you talking about?”

“It seemed so real. I really thought you died. You and nearly everyone else were captured by these aliens, they boarded the ship by chewing through it with their teeth, and we couldn’t stop them taking almost everyone into their cocoons and growing baby alien larva in their blood and—” Elli was heaving a sob between every other word.

Metal on metal, light clinks were heard as the custom-made container on his back deconstructed. The clinks became little thuds as a tiny little Mimi crawled over Daniel’s shoulder. The mechanical spiderbot tilted its’ body at an angle and let out an ascending coo. The little guy moved closer, moving its’ antennae lightly across one of Elli’s horns.

At the sound of metallic clicking, Elli gave a panicked gasp, reeling back at the unexpected sense of something crawling on her horns.

Now she was a couple steps back, standing in the hall like a confused, trapped animal, and trying to process the conflicting experience with the present reality. “It’s Mimi, it’s just Mimi, it’s not a necro-flesh bug, it’s not!”

Daniel shared a look with Mimi. Suddenly, the fuzzy-bodied friend perked up, pointing to the PADD on the floor. Daniel could see that Mimi was speaking through it with text on the screen. ‘Simulation gone wrong.’ was written on it.

“Hoards of them,” Elli was pulling on both of her ears in residual disgust, trying to get control of it, “swarming the walls, making nests in the ceilings, everywhere… everywhere…”

“I was in a…” Daniel looked back up from the PADD on the floor, “holodeck program? And I died? That’s…” He wasn’t sure what to say to that. “Anyway, why didn’t you just turn it off? End the program?”

“Don’t you get it? ” She held both of her hands out in font of her in a frustrated gesture and then grabbed him by the front of the uniform as if to shake him by it, but he remained still as her threshing motion just rocked her own self back and forth with emphasis. “Don’t you think I would have thought of it! I don’t remember even being in the holodeck in the first place! I don’t know how I even got there! I’m not even really sure I’m not in a holodeck now! How can I even know? How can anyone know they’re awake or in a simulation? Maybe this entire universe is a simulation no one can turn off!”

Elli started hyperventilating ….
(tune in next week)