Posted by Captain Rende Asam (Commanding Officer) in Main Sim - Engineering

Posted by Master Chief Petty Officer Karl Johansson (Chief Engineer) in Main Sim - Engineering

Posted by EvilJen (DDoSFEO) in Main Sim - Engineering
Posted by… suppressed (14) by the Post Ghost! 👻
Engineering was being inundated with calls to report glitching monitors and read outs. The most recent one came from sickbay. [O]Sickbay to Engineering. We’re having some sort of odd malfunction with one of our monitors.[o]

-OZ

On the back of that request another came from the bridge. [O]Asam to Johansson. What can you do to the deflector and shields? We’re going into the nebula.[c]

Cpt. Asam, CO

The chorus of calls hadn’t stopped — Sickbay, Science labs, even auxiliary stations in the lower decks were reporting the same thing: monitors flickering, diagnostic readouts spitting phantom errors, systems behaving as if caught in overlapping echoes.

Then it hit closer to home.

The impulse control console at the heart of Engineering shivered with a burst of static, panels stuttering in sync with the disturbances rolling through the ship. Status lights for the port engine went amber, then red.

Impulse Drive Status: OFFLINE.

A low vibration tremored through the deck plates, the faint thrum of the engines fading until it was gone altogether. For a heartbeat, the entire room was quiet — no steady hum, no familiar rhythm of the drives. Just the ship’s background life support systems holding steady.

Emergency readouts painted the picture in stark terms:

Power flow diverted mid-cycle, relays tripped.

Control circuits unresponsive to reset.

Restart attempt: INHIBITED — error code cycling too fast to track.

And through it all, a subtle distortion ghosted across the deflector diagnostic panel — the same interference Johansson had just been asked to brace against for the Veil.

The Sentinel now had shields, deflectors, and warp power. But impulse? Dead.

-OZ

[O]Engineering, what happened to the engines?![C] She wasn’t waiting for answer. It was clear she expected them back on before they ever went out.

Cpt. Asam, CO

[O] Engineering here, Captain. We’ve got shields back up, but I’m getting some strange readings on diagnostics… Impulse Engines aren’t responding at all, I’m trying to reroute power and get them restarted. Stand by. [C]

Franklin swore quietly to himself, and began the start up procedure for the Impulse Drive while keeping one eye on the Diagnostic panels. “C’mon Darlin’ don’t do me like that…” He muttered, checking power levels. The interference on the Deflector screen panel caught his eye and he stared for a moment, brown eyes focusing as he ran through another diagnostic. Checking the Warp Core, he briefly wondered if he could shunt power to the Impulse Drive through the backup relays… The silence and lack of vibration made him unconsciously nervous, his feet unused to feeling nothing through the deck plates.

-CPO Franklin, Engineering

Hugh was scratching his head trying to figure out what was wrong with the impulse engines but he couldn’t get a diagnostic to tell him anything. As he looked over, he said, “Chief, I’m at a loss as to what is happening.”

MacClure, Engineer

“One of us ought to get to deck one and manually check the impulse drive…” Franklin glanced at MacClure, the concern showing on his face. “Where’s the Chief?”

-CPO Franklin, Engineering

A hatch to one of the maintenance shafts hissed open, and Karl pulled himself free “You try to get some quality maintenance done and my engine bay falls apart” He muttered to himself, but the annoyed words did not match the smile on his face. He half-leapt half half-jogged to check the maintenance display, stroking the console absently as he read “Franklin take a team and check the Imp drive” He said as he tried to enlarge and pause the error message “MacClure check the relays that tripped, I’ll see to the control circuits, everyone grab a communicator if you’re leaving home” He made his decisions quickly.

Master Chief Karl - CE

“Aye Chief,” Hugh replied as he got up to go inspect all the relays.

MacClure, Engineer

“Aye sir.” Franklin nodded to Karl, and went to the nearest equipment locker. He pulled out two communicators and turned back. “Mac, heads up..” James tossed one of the communicators to MacClure, grinning. Then he headed for the hatch, opening the remaining communicator and hailing two on duty crewmen to meet him on deck one to inspect the Impulse drive.

-CPO Franklin, Engineer

Hugh grabbed the communicator out of the air and nodded.

MacClure, Engineer

Karl grabbed his own kit and a communicator “Alright let’s get our girl back in fighting form” He called out to the team.

Master Chief Karl - CE

The silence of the drive chamber stretched — too long, too empty. For a ship this size, the absence of vibration was like a heartbeat gone still.

MacClure’s relay inspection revealed a mess of tripped circuits, but the pattern wasn’t random. They’d blown in sequence, like dominoes tipped one after another, each cascading failure already queued before the last collapsed.

On Franklin’s trek toward Deck One, the impulse corridor felt wrong beneath the boots. The lights stuttered, flickering not with power loss but with a strange doubling effect — as if two overlapping versions of the same space were fighting for primacy. His tricorder scan caught it: relay feeds pulsing on and off in microbursts too fast for human eyes to track, each flicker generating phantom readings in the surrounding bulkheads.

And at the main console Karl examined, the “cycling” error finally stilled long enough for a message to appear, just a breath longer than a blink.

ERROR: INPUT ANTICIPATED.

Then it was gone. The restart inhibit resumed, codes scrolling too quickly to follow.

For an instant, though — for anyone near the board — it hadn’t looked like code at all.
More like letters forming. Words. Shapes.

And always, just at the edge of hearing, that low vibration. Not from the core. Not from the drives. From somewhere else, threading through the hull itself.

EvilJen, DDoSFEO

Karl scrunched his face at the screen. He had the superstitious nature of an old school engineer, truly believing in the spirit of his engines, which meshed well with his Icelandic sense of The supernatural might just be real, so let’s not kick the moss-covered rock because Elves might just live there so when the code seemed to become words, he felt a cold chill, the hair on the back of his neck rise. He stroked the side of the console “What’s wrong Lady?” He said in a whisper, then tapped on the console, trying to bypass the error scroll to see the problem

Master Chief Karl - CE

For a heartbeat, the hum beneath Karl’s fingertips felt like it answered.

Not the mechanical rhythm of power cycling through conduits — this was subtler. Warmer. Almost a pulse. The metal seemed to breathe beneath his touch, exhaling a faint shimmer of static across his knuckles.

The bypass command stuttered, then forced its way through. For a moment, the scroll froze. Lines of data rearranged themselves into coherence.

DIAGNOSTIC ROUTINE INTERRUPTED.
LOCAL CONTROL PRIVILEGES: OVERRIDDEN.
QUERY: WHO IS ASKING?

Then the console blinked out. Total black.

Around him, a soft creak rolled through the deck plating — the kind of sound that normally meant heat expansion, except this carried through every conduit like a voice too large to fit inside the ship. The low vibration returned, just beneath audible range, crawling along the metal of the room.

At the far side of Engineering, one of the plasma conduits flickered and bled faint blue light from its seals, not rupturing — just weeping. The glow pulsed in slow, even rhythm, like a heartbeat matching the unseen thrum beneath the ship’s skin.

The error lights across the board came back online one by one, but not in Starfleet-standard amber or red. They glowed a soft, unsettling violet — the color of the nebula outside.

OOC: Started a separate thread for Franklin’s team here: https://www.star-fleet.com/core/stf5/sentinel/posts/282614/?page=1

EvilJen, DDoSFEO

Karl hesitated as he stared at the console, he could feel cold sweat dripping down his back, that was not normal. He’d seen odd things throughout his years in the Fleet but nothing like this. He glanced back, trying his best to hide his nerves.

He tapped on the console, typing his reply with one hand as the other tried to find out what was going on with the lights.

RESPONSE: CHIEF ENGINEER KARL

Master Chief Karl - CE

The moment Karl’s fingers pressed the final key, the console paused mid-blink. The entire wall of displays went still, as if the ship had taken a breath and was waiting for something.

Then, letter by letter, a reponse.

ACKNOWLEDGED.
KARL.

The name lingered too long on the screen before the pixels wavered faintly and reformed into new text — as though the system were tasting it.

YOU HEAR THEM TOO.

Behind him, the violet-lit conduits pulsed once. Twice. A third time. The pulsing was in perfect sync with the faint, low thrum that had been crawling through the deck plating since the first failure. Only now it wasn’t faint — it was inside the room.

Beyond the bulkhead came the familiar chunk of a distant relay engaging, even though Karl hadn’t triggered any manual resets. The drives were no longer silent like they should be. They began to hum again in uneven bursts, an imperfect match to the ship’s cadence - its heartbeat.

Then the console flickered again, as the lights dimmed.

DON’T LET THEM WAKE IT.

Static rippled across the screens. The text dissolved. Power readings blinked back to normal — but the hum didn’t stop.

It was still there, running just below the range of the human ear. A subsonic whisper threading through the hull.

Karl stared at the screen for a few seconds in silence, then slowly let go and stepped back “Nope” He said, grabbed his communicator and flipped it open. [O]Karl to Bridge, my engine is talking to me” His voice was even but monotonous, which was odd for the usually eternally cheerful Engineer “It gave a warning: Don’t Let Them Wake It. I’m not certain if we are the them, nor what It is but I’m hearing things “He tried to give the best information without succumbing to the panic that was creeping up “I’m not certain if I’m suffering from auditory or visual hallucinations, it might be best to have Medical send someone down here[O]

Master Chief Karl - CE