(Please Note: I make small references to two made-up religions, and a peanut-related snack food that are not canon in game.)
The Vicar runs up the rusty staircase, flinging open the door leading to the roof of the sparsely occupied building. He runs to the edge and looks out over the curved, vibrant Fallbrook main street, concentrating hard on the shapes of the buildings. "Hmm..."
The young lady calmly peers over the edge of the two-story building. "What's 'hmm'? And where are you planning on going?"
"I'm trying to follow the landmarks to find the scientist, but my brain isn't…" he snaps a few times, trying to find the right words. "It's not...making connections."
"Left," she says, looking at the neon sign over the right middle building. "Follow the low river, then left." She's confused, but it's clear in her mind what the trail looks like.
"Are you seeing the landmarks?"
"I..." The trails of where almost every interesting place crosses her mind, leaving a jumble of directions that are clear as crystal to her. "I don't know, exactly. I can't describe it without sounding crazy."
"Left it is, then." He leads the way back downstairs.
"By the Law, how do you get anywhere with directions like these," she genuinely wonders, trying to iron out the mental mess into something more orderly.
The two weave their way around a smattering of overturned furniture, as the Vicar opens every box and closet he can get his hands on. "I manage."
"And 'by Order and the Law go you', I suppose."
"Sure, I guess." He heads outside and down the lit up central street.
At the edge of town, she points the way toward the cave deeper in the wilderness. "Considering the place where we met the man was in shambles, he may not even be there anymore."
"It doesn't matter, I have to start somewhere." The old man veers away from the road, cutting through the foliage.
"So you're bringing only me? Into a Raptidon-infested cave where three of us barely made it out alive, let along through, unscathed."
"You either take it or leave it Vicar. You said you didn't want to explain all this," he waves his hand in her general direction. "And you know for a fact, whoever we bring along is gonna start asking questions, with the exception being SAM."
The young lady huffs, pulling a soft frown at the mention of the large, green bot's name. "Fine, but if anything happens—"
"I'll trust you to be angry ol' you, Vicar DeSoto. Just in a less muscle-bound body." A stray bullet whizzes by, nicking him in the arm. "Fuck! What the hell was that from?!"
"Trees, now!" The Captain heads for the thickest cluster, dragging the hurt Vicar along behind her. The young woman carefully examines the wound and determines it to be a non-lethal crease, but it will hurt for a while.
The old man swears up a storm through a set jaw, bringing out his weapon. "Ellie wasn't kidding, you do curse a lot for a religious figure."
"And you keep confusing a Scientician Vicar with a Neo-Catholic Priest and a New Christian Disciple." As she pokes her head from behind cover, another shot narrowly misses her.
What sounds like commands in gibberish are shouted to the nearby rocky hills, and a group of scattered Marauders hurries down from both sides, weapons ready.
The over-zealous young lady bears her teeth, bring out her pistol as she charges toward the group still cracking shots off.
"You don't just run in, Vicar," he shouts over the gun fire, poking his head out from behind thin trunks. "You're still me, remember!"
The young woman catches a shot in her upper thigh, flooring her in an instant.
The old man ignores the stinging throb of his wounded arm, chasing after the young lady as he picks up a fist-sized fungus-crusted rock. He scampers up the nearer of the hillsides, hurling the stone at the nearest Marauder. It beans him square in the middle of his helmet, stunning him a few seconds. "Over here, you brain-dead son of a bitch!" He picks up another rock and effortlessly pitches it hard at the helmet of another one of the crazed group, getting him in the same exact spot as the other. "Fresh meat, you listless unemployed—" A few of the attackers bring their sights to bear on the Vicar who makes haste down the hill, collecting rocks and dodging bullets.
The Captain uses the momentary distraction to crawl into cover behind a thick cluster of hearty fungus stalks. She grabs hard at the bleeding wound, squeezing as she takes shots at rag and peace meal plated backs, watching them fall one by one.
Despite his best efforts, Vicar DeSoto cannot seem to pull the collective attentions of their attackers away from the wounded young lady, even when in the thick of battle.
As the bodies settle into the red and brown dirt, and the weapons are finally put away, the two travelers are bloody and exhausted.
The old man limps over to where the young lady has holed up as best she could, seeing her applying pressure to a large stain of red seeping out from underneath her black chest plate.
The young woman slumps over onto the dirt, her eyes lidded and her chest heaving.
"You idiot," he quietly chastises, laying her out on her back and removing her chest armor. "You're supposed to stay back and distract them, like I always do."
She lets out a strangled cry of pain as one of his larger hands press into her bleeding side. With the other free, he reaches into her satchel and brings out her emergency inhaler and forces her take a dose.
The Captain's pain ebbs away as her wounds clot and scab almost immediately. "Very...tired. Lost... lots of...blood."
The old man slaps her cheek gently, keeping her in the waking world. "Come on, Vicar, don't go to sleep. My—your hands are awkward, and I need my brain."
"But I'm...tired."
A deep, guttural growl from a nearby ridge line makes the hair on the back of the old man's neck stand. He carries her in the direction they were headed before their harrowing clash, detouring to the nearest empty cave he can find.
Over the steady drip of water from the rocky roof of the cave, the Vicar sits against a cool stone wall, keeping vigil over his passed out colleague laying next to him. He expertly pitches chunks of rock dead center through the holes of a yellow fungus lattice across the stony room, thinking slowly through their conundrum. The old man sighs, frustrated by the and ineptitude of himself in a fight. "I don't work like this. What if we're stuck," he wonders to himself in a low, soft voice. "What if that machine can't fix us? Are just going to stay this way until we die?" The notion of dying as an old man disgusts and frightens him. "I'm not going to dwell on it." He waves his worry away, reaching into his satchel for the blueprint data pad.
He flips though the renderings on the small screen one by one, methodically going over every word, note, and footnote, to try to suss out some kind of workaround. The circuits and wires make more sense than before, but his brain can't seem to make heads or tails of how one console directs power to the other. "Flow regulator to Conduit…One goes to the other, but why doesn't this make sense?" His brow furrows as he chews on the information presented on the screen. The same nagging feeling from before prods at his thoughts as he sits and stares at the half of the blueprint labeled 'Conduit'. "That word…" The nag becomes an itch, and the itch, an urge, the longer he stares at the word, until finally, something clicks into place. "That word wasn't there before! It was Converter, not Conduit!" His happy revelation is quickly soured by the thought of someone tampering with the pad. "Shit."
From beside a contemplative Vicar, the Captain wakes up, blinking the fatigue from her eyes. She smacks her dry lips, taking a hard look at her surroundings. "This isn't the right cave. Did I pass out?"
The old man places his pad on the dirt floor of the cave face down, picking up a sharp rock. "For two hours."
The young woman sits up, confused as to why he's feeling around the back of the portable computer with scrutinizing fingers. "What in the name of the Law are you doing?"
"Trying to get to the battery." His long fingers catch on a nearly invisible seam near the bottom of the device. He drives the pointy end of the rock down where his fingers are poised, denting the thick plastic-metal cover.
"Are you insane?!" She rolls over and snatches the pad away before he can do anymore damage. "We need that blueprint!"
"That's not the right one anyway!" He tries to take it back, but her reflexes are still faster than his, even in her recuperating state. "Give me it!"
She gets to her feet, and runs to the eastern side of the cave. The young woman deftly climbs up a group of moist red rocks, her occupied hand not slowing her down in the least.
The old man follows after her the few feet up, but she shoves him away with a dirty boot to his shoulder, watching him back slide off the rocks and land awkwardly on his feet at the bottom. He tries once more, but the same result happens. His heavier, muscular body is no match for her skinnier, quicker one. "That's not fair, you're using me against me," he shouts up after her as she climbs higher.
"This," she holds out the scuffed data pad from her perch, raising her voice over the reverberation of the cave. "Is the only thing we have left if we can't locate the scientist! Why were you trying to break it?!"
The Vicar gives up on trying to climb after her, instead resorting to cupping his hands around his mouth. "I found something interesting when you were asleep! Look at the annotation between the tenth and eleventh slides in the larger margin! It says 'Conduit', not 'Converter'!"
The Captain flips through the screens, studying the letters intently. "I don't see a difference! Maybe you're mistaken!"
"I remember specifically working on the console labeled 'Converter', not 'Conduit'!"
"And you're sure you're remembering it right?!"
"I'm completely sure! Your head's a steel trap! It took me a while, but I remember you said 'Converter' in passing!" He shakes his head. "I said, not you, which means—"
"Your pad was tampered with! Also something about shoes!" She furrows her brow, not seeing the connection.
"Are you going to let me crack open the pad now, Vicar?!"
"No!" She stores it in her satchel. "We may need it as a Plan B!"
He gives her a few choice words under his breath before changing the subject. "Hey! I got a question about you!"
" 'Have a question', not 'got'!"
"You can throw a ball like nobody's business, why don't you hit people with rocks when you fight?!"
The look of sheer disbelief that plants itself on her pinched, feminine features is nearly palpable. "For the same reason anyone with a brain doesn't bring a knife to a gun fight!"
"Oh…"
A frown pulls at the side of her lips as she climbs back down. "Do you know what surprises me the most about you?!"
"My charm and good looks?!"
"Your intelligence and mental fortitude!" The Captain hops from a ledge to a boulder, wedging herself between two stalagmites as she moves down. "Although why you see fit to hide it behind this...overly jolly, idiotic facade of yours is beyond me!"
He furrows his brow, giving her an inquisitive look as he watches her climb down the jagged face of a rock wall. "You think I'm a softie, Vicar?"
"No, but I do think you're troubled." Her boots meet the dirt floor with a soft thud. The young woman dusts her hands off, amazed she's not out of breath. "You're always rambling on about being a Hope colonist, but we both know that's impossible. Something truly terrible must have happened to you to make you believe that."
He rolls hie eyes, getting peeved. "Why did I even bother telling you the truth, you don't believe me."
"On the contrary, I believe you, but only because you believe what you're saying with unshakable conviction."
"Which is the same thing as saying 'you're nuttier than mock peanut spread'. Like I said, you don't believe me, like everybody else I've told."
"And there you are, assuming I'm small-minded. Just because I'm a 'crotchety old bastard'," she emphasizes the words with finger quotes. "Doesn't mean I'm thick-headed."
"You could have fooled me, Scientician Man," the mocking tone of the last two words serves to make his female companion's headache twinge a bit harder than usual.
"That's not even a proper insult to Scientism, let alone offensive." The Captain leads the way out of the cave, stopping at the mouth to wait for the old man to follow. "If you're finished slinging your juvenile insults, let's get going."
"Speaking of 'going'…" The Vicar looks down at his beige and tan pants, frowning.
"Now?! Of all the times, it's now?!"
"I drank too much coffee this morning, so sue me!" He gives a cursory glace around the rocky insides, hurrying behind the widest of the stalagmites. "Nag, nag nag!"
With the bright yellow sun shining bright and hot in the midday sky, the two travelers march across the short grass to the out of the way place this whole fiasco started. "That's it." The Captain points at the entrance to the cave nestled between a grove of trees sparse with leaves, and a boulder with inhumanely large chips taken out of it. "Under the cold-naked tree next to the bitten boulder." Her lips twist into a disgusted frown. "How is that a sentence?"
"It's not, it's directions." He rushes down the road, stopping at the too perfect opening of the cave. He brings out his shotgun, leaning toward the darkness, leading with his ear. "I think the Raptidons left," he whispers, taking a step inside.
"Don't be an idiot," she tells him, bringing out her pistol and heading onward.
He mocks her under his breath, following close behind.
Where the cave entrance splits off deeper into the darkness, the two travelers take opposite sides of the fork, and agree to meet on the other side.
After a few minutes of groping and stumbling through nothing but dim light, they exit into a large, oblong room hewn from the rock of the cave, the Captain on the upstairs level, and the Vicar at the downstairs.
Large, open spaces dot the floor between empty desks and overturned chairs. Anything not heavy or bolted to the floor is piled against the only other way leading from the room, with the flimsy door half hanging off its hinges.
The two poke around the abandoned furniture on both levels, finding vague notes and only the basics of handheld machinery abandoned in the rush to leave.
Out of habit, the Vicar opens every locker and supply box, finding only the bare minimum of useful things.
Seeing their search over before it started, they meet one another on the top floor stairwell, telling the same story of naught found about the man they came for.
"They left. A while ago it seems," the Captain points out, nodding at the fine layer of dust on the light fixture above her head.
The older man sighs, climbing the metal stairs to the upper floor. "Dammit…" He paces between the office furniture, flexing the nervous energy out of his hands.
"It looks as if they were in a hurry, as well." She gives a cursory glace at the lower floor's disheveled state.
"Dammit!" With a loud, angry shout, he slaps a desk lamp violently from its perch on the corner of the nearest desk, sending it crashing onto the tile floor. "Why can't anything be easy!"
The young woman feels her shoulders tense, and her body coil with anxiety. She plants her boots resolutely, refusing to give into her flight instinct. "Getting angry isn't going to solve anything! Calm down!"
"I can't, you're just—" He can't seem to find the appropriate words to put to the hard knot of emotion churning in his chest and belly. "I'm getting tired of it!"
She keeps herself in one place with every ounce of her willpower, watching her hands tighten around the railing of the upper story as she tries to keep her emotions in check. "Maybe now you'll listen to me when I say 'this is not a good idea, don't do it'."
The Vicar starts reciting whatever comes to mind as he tries to calm himself with more pacing.
She watches him try to work through the mess of anger and resentment by dissecting and bottling it up, but his tense posture and hard tone tells her it's fruitless. "Its not working, is it? You still feel like you want to physically destroy something with your bare hands, don't you?"
"Yeah."
Her years of seminary discipline kick in, and the need to run is beaten back from her fore brain. She turns to look him straight in the eye, unwavering in her next statement. "Then do it."
His harsh tone is now squarely directed at the woman with a single desk between them. "I'm not gonna go around breaking things because I feel like it."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not my stuff to break!"
"Your problem is you keep thinking like you. You bottle your negative feelings and redirect them to another outlet. I don't have that luxury, sadly. My feelings are always churning and boiling right at the surface, and when it bubbles over, it's already too late. Stop thinking like you, and start thinking like me, or very soon, you're going to kill someone you don't mean to in a blind rage." After her insightful rambling, she pauses for a moment, wondering where it all came from.
An epiphany strikes the man. "That explains why you look like you're constantly stewing about something but you can't figure out what."
The Captain gives an irritated huff, demanding he either go break something expensive, or they get back to the task at hand.
Still feeling a bit cross with his ordeal, he picks up a flimsy metal chair and sends it flying into the screen of a nearby video monitoring console, lodging its four legs inside the broken glass screen. He laughs as the wires spark and blink inside the monitor, feeling his head clear and his mood even out. "Let's see the facts. I know—you know how to read the shorthand in the facility, and the shorthand you use came from your seminary studies. Ergo, the facility used OSI money, or the people in charge are from the OSI."
"Obviously," the young woman retorts, crossing her arms.
"But not so obvious is the fact that it's abandoned, and a working prototype was left inside." He drudges up images of places they've been to, trying to make sense of the bits and pieces of scattered information they've collected so far. "Nobody just leaves a prototype laying around unless its under dire circumstances. When we talked to the scientist, he wasn't worried about the machine so much as he was about worried whether we could find it, and make sure it worked."
A thought comes to her in a jumbled flash. "It was a set-up? A very elaborate set-up?"
"It might not be a set-up." The Vicar shrugs, chewing on the breadcrumb clues swimming around his noggin. "The man and whoever he's working with probably wanted to prove a point, and we just happened to cross their path. We have something of a reputation by now, at least. Maybe he saw this as a 'feather in his cap' sort of thing."
The lady furrows her brow, waggling her finger in his general direction. "No, wait a minute. This is making even less sense than before. Why would any Scientician with even the slightest amount of clout be funding and staffing a project like this? Results are what they're after, not pseudo-intellectual excises with large price tags."
The old man throws his hands up, conceding to her will. "Well, I can't make any sense of it either, except for the fact that we need to find a way to get to the OSI and ask questions."
The Captain chuckles at the thought of the Order being that reasonable to the layman. "You don't talk to the OSI, the OSI talks to you. At their leisure, I might add."
"You're a Vicar, you must know some people."
"Yes, I'm one of the anointed, but one who's not in very good standing with the majority of my superiors."
He groans, not seeing any other way but a clear-cut straight path ending in the truth. "Maybe we need to get the others into this, then. They might be able to help."
"Let me refresh your memory, Captain." Before she goes on another verbal tirade, she takes a deep breath to steady her nerves. "The last time we interacted with the rest of crew in this very compromising state, their attitudes were less than understanding, to put it mildly. If we were to earnestly tell them the truth, they might think we're still lying, or even worse, crazier than before. And if the crew says you're a 'bona fide' crazy, and not just your average run-of-the-mill disturbed, I doubt your ship will stay in your hands long enough for you to protest." A wave of chills washes over her as she finishes.
"You always think the worst of people, don't you Vicar?"
"I'm being realistic. This is the exact reason I refused to tell anyone in the first place."
He takes a seat on the corner of desk, taking a few, long minutes to come to a conclusion where they both will be satisfied. The Vicar sees only one. "Since I say yes, and you say no, we'll fight for it." He holds out his closed fist sideways toward the woman leaning against the upper railing.
She narrows her eyes at him.
"Paper, Rock, Scissors, dummy, not an actual fight." He puts on his best nonplussed expression, waiting for her to comply with a closed fist of her own.
"By the Architect and the Law..." She rolls her eyes, then holds out her fist in the same way "I can't believe our fate comes down to a child's game."
"Oh, quit your whining and count us down, Vicar."
She slumps in defeat as they pump their fists up and down in sync. "Paper, rock, Scissors, shoot!"