Posted by Gamemaster Nosferatu (Gamemaster) in Main Sim: Sickbay
Snip

Grahams bit his tongue to stop himself from cursing. Another curveball. It was just like the rugby season when he was 16 he told himself, they’d been set to win, their best lock got injured, one of the backs got a concussion and just when they thought they’d have a full team again their Captain had to take time off after his father passed away. It had been a rough season for their team and they had come 5th of the season. They got through it and the following season had placed themselves back in the top three teams. This was the same. Just make the next tackle and keep his focus on winning this game.

“Neuro readings have changed again,” He muttered quietly to himself, “First desynchronising and now, they’re almost over-synchronising with each other.” He had no idea what any of it could mean.

Then the patient woke up and spoke, and it finally dawned that the crew weren’t just synchronising with each other but that there was potentially another entity out there that was somehow connected to this, something else that might be related to these neural changes. Then the cold and chilling thought that maybe they were synchronising to this external force.

He moved over to the patient, “Who?” he asked, “Who knows we’re here?”

Lt. Kahu Grahams, CMO

The question hung in the air for only a moment.

The patient’s eyes remained open, fixed on something none of the medical staff could see. Around Sickbay, monitors began chirping almost simultaneously. Several biobeds registered identical neural fluctuations.

Then another patient stirred. And another and a third officer sat upright abruptly, drawing a startled gasp from a nearby nurse. “They know…” the lieutenant whispered.

Across the ward, a crewman who had been unconscious for nearly six hours spoke at the exact same moment. “…they know…”

The words overlapped perfectly, not repeated. but synchronized.

Doctor Grahams’ display erupted with scrolling data.
Neural patterns that had previously shown individual variation were now converging at an alarming rate. Distinct brainwave signatures were beginning to mirror one another across multiple patients. Not identical—no two minds could become identical—but approaching a level of coherence medical science considered impossible.

Then the environmental systems registered a fluctuation. Temperature: -2.3°C, humidity increased.

For a fraction of a second, several personnel reported hearing distant sounds. Wind. Flowing water. A low harmonic resonance. The sounds vanished as quickly as they appeared.

A nurse looked around uneasily. “Did anyone else hear that?”

Before anyone could answer, every active neurological monitor in Sickbay produced a single sharp tone. The patients froze with all eyes-widening
and their heads turned as if controlled by the same wire. All toward the same wall.

The bulkhead itself showed nothing unusual.

On the consoles there were no life signs, no energy emissions and nothing visible on any sensor. Yet every awakened patient stared at the exact same point.

And then, quietly, as if speaking with one voice through many mouths, they answered Doctor Grahams’ question. “Not who.”

The words emerged from half a dozen patients simultaneously. A pause followed.

Then:

“Where.”

The monitors surged again. For an instant, every neural scan displayed an impossible anomaly. A second pattern that did not originate from any patient. Nor from anywhere aboard the Chernov.

Yet somehow present within every synchronized reading. The unknown signature pulsed once.

Then it vanished.

Leaving only the stunned silence of Sickbay and a collection of frightened medical personnel staring at data that should not have existed.

Somewhere beyond the ship, beyond the derelict, beyond the limits of conventional sensors…

something had become aware of them.

GM Nosferatu
Your Darkest Nightmare

“Come on mate, you gotta give me more than that” Kahu muttered. He was unaware he had spoken at all his focus concentrated on the readings in front of him. Readings that shouldn’t be possible, that were nothing like anything he had ever seen before and not on this scale either. He brought his hand up to his chin and stroked it deep in thought. Trying to put together everything, the patients all synchronizing in ways they shouldn’t be able to, shared hallucinations, talking in unison, the bizzare brief change in the environment system, and then that second pattern.

He didn’t like it, he didn’t like any of it at all, but as he looked around Sickbay and saw how frightened the people around him were, he knew he had to keep it together. Even if he had no clue what the heck was going on. The needed a leader, someone to reassure them that they could do this. He was the CMO it was his job to maintain a confident aura that they could do this. Whatever this was.

They were Starfleet. They could handle anything that came their way. There was clear evidence there was another entity somewhere that was affecting the crew, an entity that seemed to identify itself as a place. Whatever that meant. He’d ponder on it later. He wasn’t sure what its purpose was with his patients, if it was trying to control for it’s own purposes or for communication with them. He didn’t believe it was trying to posses them because of that second pattern.

He hesitated. Then made his decision, he was only a doctor from the back country, speaking with entities was beyond his experience. A second opinion could be good, provide a different opinion outside of his medical experience.

=/\= Sickybay to bridge: It’s Dr Grahams here. I think someone should come down and see this. We’ve got some strange going on’s here in Sickbay. There seems to be an entity which seems to be affecting my patients, they’re reporting hearing sounds that aren’t there and have taken great interest in looking at the bulkhead. They’ve also said that they know we are here and that it’s not a who but a place. Sir, it was a little spooky, they all just spoke in unison. =/\=

One deep breath. Then he focused back on the scans, comparing the second pattern to the patterns of the patients. Now that he knew what he assumed was the source of all these changes he wanted to isolate it, see if there was a way to break that connection so he could be prepared incase this place was hostile.

“What do they want with us?” He asked one of the patients that had spoken before, “Can you communicate with them? Say that we come in peace?”

Lt. Kahu Grahams, CMO