'Engineering', the tiny callout on your HUD says. It’s pointing at a small, grey-on-white symbol with a red outline forming a rounded square. Another symbol shows 'maintenance', there's an 'airlock' one, and two green-on-white ones show 'food?' and 'stimulant beverage?'. "Well, it's working," you mutter, "kinda."
You'd returned to the elevator shaft, and moved downward until the engineering callout popped up, on what the overlay is also telling you is Deck 5. You glance up towards Deck 3, which held the ‘cryovaults’, but then recall what Twilight said about the lack of power.
A glance to the usual lever pops up symbols for 'warning', 'bulkhead door', and 'pressurized, artificial gravity'. You sigh. "Artificial gravity would be nice."
You go through the usual motions to unseal the door, and—
Are sucked downwards as air begins to howl through the pressure vents. You forgot about the breaches! The force of the fall spreads a spiderweb of hairline cracks across your faceplate, and you drag yourself off of your face. Angling yourself, you slam a hoof down on the lever to reset it. A few frantic yanks re-seat your prybar, and with a heave of your entire body, you manage to jerk the lever back outward, resealing the door.
You can’t flop, but you go limp, dangling from the door by one hoof as you catch your breath. The cracks on your faceplate slowly seal up, until you can’t see any sign of them; however, you do notice the ‘UEC’ meter in your display creep below 50%, as the suit uses up power to fix itself. Finally, after a couple of minutes, you look grumpily at the door, and launch yourself upward. It’s the work of a good quarter-hour to close both the Deck 2 door up top, and the Deck 7 door below, isolating the elevator shaft. Finally, you return to Deck 5, note your remaining three hours of breathing time, and break the seals, this time prepared for the decompression.
As the wind fades, you crack the door, and your spirits rise as you find yourself in a long, compartmentalized storage area. There has to be cable in here, right?
Right?
...
...
Right.
Over two hours later, you’ve learned that this is indeed where a large amount of extra wiring and cabling was stored. You’ve also learned that everything these aliens used for high-voltage is all-around terrible, at least after a long time in a vacuum. Anything with the right material and a large enough gauge to work as a main power line on the Frond is coated in what is now a brittle foam that turns to dust with the slightest nudge. You try to unspool a length of it, pondering ways it could be used without insulation, but the wire itself cracks apart under a bit of a stress, and you toss a chunk of it aside in frustration.
With a big sigh, you stretch yourself out, your spine popping in a few places. You did at least find a battery pack with a bit of charge remaining, and your Universal Energetic Charge meter is now back at 73%. Since you’re back down to worrisome levels of air, you’re going to need that charge so the filtering talismans can do their job once you get back into a pressurized area. First, though…
You squint at the door opposite the elevator. You’d wondered at first why the storage room is depressurized, as there’s no visible damage in here, but then you saw the pressure door was left half-open. You shuffle through, and find yourself in a short chamber, with another half-open pressure door right in front of you. To your left—the ship’s starboard—are the remains of a large, multipart door, obviously the airlock. The inner door is bent and warped, and what you can see of the outer door is in even worse shape. You can see the lower edge of a long, vertical tear in the outer hull, probably ripped open as a result of the structural torquing you noticed on your approach, and the tear wanders off upward and aftward.
You pass through the second pressure door, entering a wide hallway. In the first starboard room, you see the edge of the hull tear, and the contents of some sort of metal workshop all displaced towards the tear by the violent decompression. The other rooms are in better shape, but have still been in vacuum for years. In one of them, you do spot what looks like a desiccated donut sitting oddly undisturbed on a plate. Your mouth waters a little, but all you can do is suck down some weakly orange-flavored fluid from your suit and move along.
At the end of the hall lies the large pressure door to the cargo elevator shaft. It’s cracked just enough to admit you (or presumably one of the aliens). Just below is the roof of the cargo elevator, and above you can see a clear path until about Deck 3, where there appears to be some damage. You nervously bite your lip—at the door across the shaft, there are two new symbols, with associated callouts: ‘high radioactivity’, and ‘radiation-shielded area’. The door is sealed, but your HUD isn't popping up any outgassing warnings. Nothing happens when you gingerly pop the emergency lever, so you crack the door and check it out.
Now this is an engineering bay! Pipes! Wires! Catwalks! There's even airlocked ladders up and down to the next decks! Pinkie would be right at home here. You? You're just hoping you don't blow anything up. Also, is that a corpse?
You pick your way past some cables snaking along the floor, to a pretty important looking control console. There's a spacesuit slumped against the side, and as you come around, you can see the remains inside. They must have had a leak, or perhaps popped the seals themselves at the end, because the body looks freeze-dried by vacuum. You suppress a shiver. "So, what was so important that you, and you alone, came down here, dude?"
Checking around the body, you find a tablet, which you slip into your saddlebags. "Maybe you left a note, eh?"
You look around more, but find nothing terribly interesting, at least nothing you understand. There is, however, a rather large battery pack next to the corpse's console. It looks like it was jury-rigged into it at some point, but one terminal is disconnected now. A quick test shows it still carries a significant charge.
You're about to charge your suit, when something stops you. You look around again, then back at the body, the console, and the battery. You squint, and shake your head. "This is stupid."
With a bit of sparking and fizzling, you hook the console up.
Swiftly, a bunch of stuff flows across the screen, none of it understandable. You're peering at it, trying to figure out if you could somehow record it onto your PDA, when it goes black, except for a long white rectangle. Then a little bit more of it turns white, on the left of the bar.
And then, the whole room shakes.