>>5351318Strange, ethereal flames emanate from the demon's corpse, filling the hall and surrounding rooms. You feel no heat from them inside your armor, but they certainly look hot.
Seconds pass and eventually the flames die down. In that short time the interior of the ship has been heated to a faint glow. Smoke trails out of various nooks and crannies where objects began to burn here and there, but it seems to be over.
One of the first things you notice after it all dies down is that the black blood coating your armor wasn't burned away, but seems to have dried on. Quite hard in fact, almost like an enamel.
It has a few wrinkles and bubbles here and there, but overall it's quite glossy. You can't seem scratch it off your finger, no matter how hard you dig at it.
Fuck, you hope it didn't seal the joints on this thing. It's gonna be a pain getting you out of it if that's the case.
More importantly though, that was only two of the three demons in there. Where did the other one go?
...A short search turns up nothing, and you can't sense anything in the area either.
It was one of the smaller ones though, so it might have ran after you took out the big guy.
Since that's been dealt with, you start packing up your shit and getting ready to go. Unfortunately it seems that your KS-23 has taken quite the char to it's faux-wood handle... actually though, it might kind of good if you sand it down a bit and slap some oil on there.
This ship's Blue Box is still sitting next to the charred remains of the demon, so you grab it up as well. Immediately, you notice that It feels lighter than the others, somehow.
There's no response when you run your finger across it's shackle, or after you shake it around a bit. You don't know what exactly the demon was doing with it, but this guy might be dead. Who knows?
Even so, the cube itself is still valuable for it's metal content alone, so you'll be taking it.
After that, you head back to the AI core and hook your suit into the engineering ports back there, allowing SHODAN direct access to the ship's controls.
"What's it looking like in there, SHODAN?"
<span class="mu-i">"Well maintained. The previous AI was meticulous and likely quite intelligent. Perhaps an alpha-class AI, even. However, it seems that a power surge knocked him offline... around the time you broke through his shields."</span>
"Was he damaged by it?"
<span class="mu-i">"Unlikely. It is quite difficult to physically damage a Blue Box."</span>
"...Yeah, the box itself looks fine. Oh well. What kind of shape is this baby in?"
<span class="mu-i">"...The power systems are fried. The ship will go dark as soon as it's backup batteries run dry. It'll need rewiring, but fortunately the components used on this vessel seem to be all standard make.
I'm also getting a flood of warnings about "critical damage" to one of the generator vessels, but i think we know why that is."</span>
"Whoopsie. I'm sure it'll weld back on just fine."
<span class="mu-i">"Besides that, everything seems to be in order... except for one thing."</span>
