Quoted By:
You down the drink in three gulps, hand back the reusable container, and dive into the zip-shaft. Your stomach churns slightly, the liquid you just ingested not quite settled, but you suppress the queasiness and grab the nearest handhold as it passes you by, zooming off down the shaft.
Only instead of taking it all the way down like you originally planned, you instead take a side shaft a third of the way down, hit a micrograv transfer platform, dive into another shaft, which you ride all the way to the end, walk through a commercial concourse, filled with visitors gawking at wares and various merchants loudly shilling them, then take a particularly long zip-ride that takes you almost all the way to the outer hull. From where you board a shuttle - hey, you're still technically on the clock - heading for the industrial areas on the outer edge of the Belly.
The drop in air quality is apparent the moment you step out of the shuttle. Despite Atmosphere's best efforts to provide Barter with at least a semi-functional air circulation system, the sheer size and complexity of the station and the simple nature of gravity, carbon monoxide, along with a mixture of various other toxic gasses would always flow downward, toward the "bottom" of its gravity field. Where it would pool and gather before finally making its way into the overworked scrubbers and filters. And today, the air seems to be particularly heavy - the consequence of your persuasiveness from earlier in the day, no doubt. It's bad enough that you dig through your toolbag and pull out the air sampler, which you hang from your belt. After a minute or so of calibrating and testing, it gives a long beep and flashes a dull yellow. Tolerable - if barely.
More importantly, as you make your way deeper into the Belly, you pick up no further signs of magitech. It seems you have lost your stalker. Though that may be temporary. Magic always has been a bunch of bullshit, typically only able to be countered with more magic. And, for the current you, doing so would only create more problems than it would solve. Best you can hope for is that whoever's been spreading those bots around didn't have enough of them to infiltrate all of Barter and had to pick and choose which areas to focus on. Magitech was rather expensive, after all.
There is little foot traffic down in the Belly. Bad air keeps away all but those who need to be here for one reason or another and those few people who pass you - mostly sapients of races with lower O requirements - don't give you a second look. You're still in your overalls, carrying a toolbag with Energy Management's emblem on the front. Just another field tech sent into Barter's armpit to deal with some broken connection.
(cont)
