[snip]

Riley held his hands up in a half-shrug, causing the NE to laugh. The boss was usually good about keeping him in the loop, so the lack of information probably meant that she, too, was in the dark, and probably even more frustrated than he was about it. He sighed and hit the intercom button, highlighting all the science labs. He had to enter an override to hit that many areas at once.

=^= Attention all science personnel. Please be alert for unusual activity that may impact systems and or experiments. As of this moment all experiments will require… =^= he double checked some reporting requirements. =^= … at least level 2 logging. Please report anything out of the ordinary to your team lead. =^=

He tapped his badge again, ending the com, and then drafted a brief explanation of Lieutenant Fayth’s orders to send to the various team leads. He drummed on the table top with his forefingers before standing again. =^= Computer, put the internal sensor logs on the main holo-display. =^= He approached as the display lit with readings from the various internal sensors - temperature, radiation, particle, EPS levels, and a host of others, which he slowly paged through, looking for details out of the norm.

• Ensign Riley, Science

Internal scans soon came up, temperature readings in main enginerring were ‘blustery and wintery’ to say the least with fading signs of snow fall from the life support vents. The bridge showed a brief flash of some kind of material change before and after his conversation with Fayth but now everything seemed normal. In the ship’s armory signs were present of extra matter being present all over the armory made up of paper and plastics.

GM CockRoach

Riley stated, mouth agape, at the readings. “That’s -5° in engineering,” he muttered. He reached into the hologram, grabbed the most recent end of the graph and pulled, zooming in on the last few minutes. It was getting warmer, slowly.

He raised his hand to hit his combadge and contact them to confirm… and paused. Lieutenant Fayth said they were seeing some strange things, so this was probably correct. He scrolled through the external sensor logs again, but could find nothing that would cause any type of system shorts or failures that would lead to this.

Around him, some of the other scientists were watching him. He straightened and waved his hand. “Let’s get back to work, everybody,” he called. “Carruthers, I think you have time scheduled now to check out that pulsar we’re passing. Get on that. I want its periodicity confirmed to within a picosecond, as well as its stellar radiation pattern mapped.”

He clapped his hands. “We’re here to learn, people, so let’s do that.” He hoped that sounded convincing. His curiosity was up on the bridge and not down here, and the others’ likely were too.

• Ensign Riley, Science

Then a few minutes later. Suddenly in a flash everything was engulfed in white.

GM CockRoach