-A man in a jar-
"Don't enter the airlock just yet Crowe," Fridge warned him, "I want to make sure the pressure inside the asteroid isn't too high or too low, so I'm going to open the doors automatically first."
Crowe waited as Fridge performed the tedious process, though he had hoped that there would be people inside the base so could have some action.
The fact that the ship's scouters indicated only a very faint powerlevel of 0.01, the equivalent of a botanical garden or a nest of rats, indicated that even there were fighters hidden inside the base they wouldn't be any challenge at all.
"Ok, the pressure is ok, I'm opening the door now." Fridge remarked, stirring Crowe from his thoughts.
Fridge stood next to Crowe and punched in a code on the airlock.
"I'm Sixteen years old and the guy still uses the kiddy-lock, damnit why does this supposed 'planetnemesis-class superdestroyerstarassaultbase' or whatever the fuck this thing is even have a kiddy-lock?" Crowe thought.
The first door of the airlock opened with a hissing sound, releasing some of the musty, damp air from inside the asteroid, which had remained in there from the pressure-checking procedure, into the room.
Fridge sniffed it and said: "Damn, I'm glad I don't have to breathe."
Crowe wasn't happy: Youcmou-jin can breathe any gas that isn't inert and they can hold their breath for days if in the sunlight, but they still need to breathe.
Crowe was the first to enter, though this primarily because Fridge shoved him.
"Hey, there's a pool of blood here," Crowe yelled as he jumped up and looked at his feet, he decided to stay in the air, as this was his last pair of boots and blood was one of the few things that didn't wash off them easily.
And not at all because the thought of a pool of blood made him qeasy, or so he told himself.
Fridge bent over and, to Crowe's disgust, dipped a finger into the pool and then tasted the liquid.
"You can come down now, brave warrior, it's just water with blue algae," Fridge said sarcastically with a big grin on his face.
"Sheesh, how was I supposed to know? It looks just like the puddle you left when I sent a ki-blast right through your chest last year."
"Please don't remind me, that really did hurt a lot," Fridge grumbled while scratching the place Crowe had hit him, remembering how much it had hurt and how proud he had been of Crowe.
As they moved further into the base they arrived at the reason they'd come to the base in the first place: the storage area.
"Ok Crowe, go look for food while I check out the armoury. And don't break anything!" Fridge ordered.
"Don't worry, I won't. But I want to eat whatever I find first and you can have the left-overs." Crowe replied.
"Well, that'll have to do." Fridge sighed as he went into the Armoury and started rummaging through the cabinets.
He first walked towards the weaponscabinet, not because the weapons would do him any good, but he could tell from the number, state and insignia of the weapons how and why the base was abandoned. He opened a drawer meant to contain scouters, but as he looked inside he saw that it was filled with sheaths of paper and data disks instead.
As he moved on to the next cabinet, meant to hold blaster he first found more information-storage equipment and print-outs, he was now convinced this place had been used for research, not as a military base. That would explain the strange powerlevel readings he had gotten from this place a few weeks ago. Initially he had thought it was just an assault or something, but when it kept fluctuating in a stable pattern, he knew it was something else.
The last drawer of the cabinet however there were a few lowpower defensive blasters. They bore the mark of Coola, which would explain why the base had only been abandoned recently: Coola had died over a dozen years ago, along with Frieza and King Cold. However the rest of Clan Ice kept running their parts of the business through middle men. Because of this, the news of their demise was didn't reach the farthest regions until years later. From the look of this place it had been a secret station, so they would've been pretty out of touch with the rest of the universe.
"Fridge! Fridge! Get your ass over here!" Crowe screamed.
"Not another 'pool of blood', I hope," Fridge thought as he rushed to the refrigeration unit used to hold the food.
He found Crowe sitting in the second chamber in a corner, with his arms around his knees. His face had a look of shear terror on it.
"Crowe... What's wrong?" Fridge said, obviously distressed by his young pupil's reaction. In answer, all that Crowe did was point at a door at the other side of the room.
Fridge charged a ball of ki into his hand as he opened the door. As he looked in he saw what had upset Crowe: stasis pods, four rows of five. However most of them were damaged, containing the rotting corpses of formerly living people. Fridge realised that Crowe had never seen a corpse before, he had seen people dieing, heck he'd even killed a few in self defence. But then the corpses had always been disintergrated by the blasts that killed them. These corpses however were not disintergrated ... and the smell was horrible.
Fridge decided to try and convince Crowe to help him investigate the room. As he walked back into the room Crowe was in he saw Crowe was already standing, though he was still a bit unbalanced.
"Crowe, are you alright again?" Fridge asked carefully.
"Yeah, I'll be alright, but those guys ... they're dead, aren't they?" Crowe replied
Fridge nodded and made a questionary gesture to ask whether Crowe was ready to go back in, Crowe nodded back and followed Fridge back in.
As Crowe looked around he quickly saw another pod, standing in an alcove next to the door. Wires ran from the twenty other pods to this one. The pod had a powergauge which was almost on empty.
"I think I know what happened here," Fridge said while rubbing his chin, "These twenty pods were intended to be able revert power in order to run into power the pod in the alcove and to run power into it's occupier. However the pods have a design flaw: they're not powered properly. They only have enough power for one pod."
"Now you see in the last twenty days, the ship's scouters have picked up twenty small surges in ki coming from this place, it seems that when the central pod runs out of power, another pod shares it's energy with the central pod, but the central pod needs much more than the twenty other ones can produces alone. The batteries simply ran out and the occupiers were shocked awake and died immediately. When this happened, the main pod just switched to another pod. Each pod apparently only provided enough for one day. And now the central pod is running out too." Fridge continued.
"So let's wake him up!" Crowe yelled.
"Alright, we will," Fridge replied frankly.
Crowe moved to the pod's console and entered a code telling the computer to wake the man up. The computer replied it would take half an hour. Crowe sat down next to Fridge, who had taken a binder from a cabinet and was reading up on the research that had been done by the base's occupiers.
"Tell me something, Crowe" Fridge said, not looking up from the binder.
"Yes?"
"Do you still want to eat everything you find?" Fridge said, looking up with a grin.
And that's as good a place as any to cut this episode off. Ok, well actually I planned to end this episode with that remark a week ago.
Yes, indeed it is true: I got a review. (that rhymes) Thank you Rabid Pink Bunny, let's hope you're the first, but not the last (Hint to the other readers).
As some of you may have noticed that this whole 'abandoned base with stasis pods thing' was inspired by the 'Aliens' series. I willingly admit this: I was watching Aliens 2 while making a draft for this specific story. Even though the basics were already set.
Anyways, Aren't you just dieing to know who the man in the pod is? Aren't you just dieing to find out what the research conducted in the base was? Aren't you just dieing to find out whether Crowe will eat what he found? You're not dieing? Well then read the next episode too.