Guzcomic Finale
Guzcomic 13 -- Finale.
Whoops. I never finished this comic but it's a foundational part of Eaurp Guz's backstory! So here's some prose instead. I have been meaning to finish this comic, but between losing the files and so much time passing, I don't think I ever will. But I can at least write some prose, and include an illustration is a treat.
[First Part]
[Previous Part]
[Mirror on AO3]
[More of Eaurp Guz]
[Sequel: Surviving Schwil]
[Sequel II: Troublesome Engines] (pending)
The conclusion begins under the cut.
Rutherford dropped to the floor, and hot water rose fast around him.
"Rutherford!" Guz shouted. Had one of the arcs hit his implant? Guz almost dived in after him, but she stopped when he started to move.
"Keep it together..." he muttered to himself.
"Keep what together?" Guz said.
Rutherford stood back up and steadied himself against the scalding waves.
"We can't fix this" Rutherford said, in horror. "We've got to eject the engine."
"No!" Guz said, "The only way to do that would kill us!"
"I'm going to try--" Rutherford said, but a wave washed over him and swept him up in the currents.
Guz dived into the water after him. The currents went in confusing directions, no doubt modulated by the warp fields surrounding them. One differential was so strong it threatened to pull Guz apart like taffy. But she pressed on until at last she grabbed onto Rutherford, and tried to rise to the surface. Just then, the currents shifted, and she was sucked deeper, down to the floor, and dragged back towards the field coils. Then she and Rutherford rose towards the surface, sucked up into the floating loop of water they'd seen before.
Guz swam faster and faster and breached the water. The warp fields curved her back down, but she flapped her tail on the surface of the water and entered a sort of spiralling orbit around the water loop--and narrowly avoided one of the electric arcs. It had been a small blessing that the water was pure enough to act as an insulator.
Rutherford coughed up some water and started breathing normally. Then he said--or rather, his implant said in his voice--"automatic CPR complete."
Guz wrapped her tail around Rutherford and slung her arm up to the platform above the engine. One arm caught it, the other stretched too far to the right and fell apart in the shifting warp field. Guz shouted and gritted her teeth. She wrapped her good arm over the handrail, grabbed the handrail with her hand, and pulled her arm shorter and shorter, pulling herself and Rutherford 'up' the local gravity well until the Cerritos' deck plating could take over.
Guz flopped over to the jeffries tube hatch, and dragged Rutherford into it, and closed the hatch in front of her. She flopped back and dove down into the water towards the control console.
She hit the emergency shutdown. The glow of the two engines in the neighboring engine bays subsided, but this one kept running.
Guz was starting to feel light of 'breath'; this water was not oxygenated. She checked the systems monitor. The water was used as both propellant and coolant, and clearly there had been a leak. But internal sensors couldn't detect a leak in the system. What else could cause this? She opened the log files. About 30 minutes ago, the engine registered a subspace distortion and engaged the warp coils to compensate.
When it took too much power from the warp core, it engaged its fusion reactors.
When it needed more power, it engaged the other impulse reactors in this cluster. By this point it was at 600% of allowable power limits--1200% if you went by starfleet specs.
Guz had to surface for air, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to get back to the console if she did... she stretched her nose out into a long tube and floated it up to the surface to use it as a snorkel.
Ok, so it was overheating. The system then attempted to deal with this automatically by dumping slush deuterium from the propellant tanks into the coolant system... and then it ran out of the allotted deuterium budget, of course.
Oh you're a clever little engine, Guz thought.
The engine's computers had to find a different source of coolant--the water propellant for the resistojet maneuvering thrusters!
But what had caused the initial failure?
Guz accessed internal sensors. According to a report by D'vana Tendi(!), the Cerritos had passed within a few thousand kilometers of a dilithium and verterium rich moon of the gas giant they were studying, which prevented the Cerritos' warp field from coupling to subspace. That had to be related. The subspace distortions produced by the gas giant's magnetodisk energizing the minor moon must have built a feedback loop with the impulse field coils.
Why only this engine? Guz thought. Oh.
This was the engine with the impulse field regulator on it. This engine tried to prevent a minor miscalibration by completely overreacting and practically melting down over it. Guz gently rubbed the console as if to, well, console it. Then she got to work.
-------
On the bridge, Ens. Lisdolin Kerman said "!captaiN ,I've lost helm controL¡"
"Confirmed," Tendi said, "the impulse engine override has been activated."
"Captain to impulse control room, what's happening?"
There was no answer.
"Impulse control room, respond."
Still no answer.
"Get someone down there," Freeman said.
Ransom nodded. "Ransom to Billups. Shax is going to meet you in the impulse field regulator room. We've lost control of the impulse engine, and there's someone there who isn't responding."
"It seems like someone is applying a nonstandard subspace manifold to the impulse engine," Tendi said. "Oh wow, that doesn't look good. The impulse field regulator room is generating almost half a cochrane of subspace field distortion all concentrated in one place."
"Can you shut it down?" Freeman said.
"Not without risking a subspace field collapse," Tendi said.
Said Ensign Kerman, ".waiT .waiT .looK .the other engines are adjusting their subspace fielD"
"There's a half cochrane field distortion of opposite phase in the impulse field regulator room!"
"What does that mean?"
"Whoever's in there must have been trying to fix it. It looks like it worked."
"Billups to bridge. We can't contact sickbay from here, but Ens. Rutherford's down here and he needs medical attention fast."
"Bridge to sickbay," Freeman said.
"Comm lines to sickbay are down," Ens. Iris said. "looks like they overheated."
"Captain?" Tendi said.
"Ensign Tendi, get down there," Freeman said. "Someone get down to sickbay and tell them to expect a patient."
"Yes ma'am!"
---------
The engines would be back to normal in as little as an hour. Guz would have to go back and adjust the software so this never happens again. With the overheating under control, Guz was able to gently persuade the computer to let her drain the water from the engine bay.
Guz breathed a sigh of relief and retracted her nose-snorkel. "I love my job." She shapeshifted her tail back into legs, and got up to go find her pants. Ah, there they--
--------
Ensign Eaurp Eugigathlia Waralslaup Guz had felt plenty of pain before, but nothing like this. She felt like she was being ripped to shreds, boiled, and burned all at once.
It hurt.
It HURT.
WHY WON'T IT STOP HURTING.
And then the pain stopped.
"Where am I?" Guz said.
"You're in the tumblr post" the author replied.
"I can't see anything," Guz said.
"I know, I'm sorry, I couldn't keep making the comic, I honestly have no clue how I managed to do so much of it back then, so we're doing prose now."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"You will, one day," the author said.
"Why am I here?" Guz said.
"Well, there was gonna be a part here where you meet a star god, but that character got erased from existence before I could get around to finishing this story, so I had to substitute that part for a bit that foreshadows your adventures with plurality."
"Oh. I don't know what any of that means."
"It means you're not DONE yet. You got hit by an arc of high voltage electro-plasma from the impulse engine, because you forgot to degauss it after all that stuff happened. You died. Someone had to bring you back to life, and I guess now it's gotta be an author ex machina kinda situation. I mean I guess it's more interesting than just reusing the Koala and Black Mountain running gag from the show, which was my second choice."
"Oh. I am still very confused and I don't know what's going on and I can't see anything and I'm kind of freaking out--"
"Hey don't worry girlypop, you're just having a very strange dream. You probably won't even remember any of this. Now watch out, this might hurt."
"Wha--eoughhh..."
The pain was back. A duller pain, not nearly as bad as before.
------
"Oh my gosh I thought I'd lost you!" Tendi said. "You did it--you saved the Cerritos!"
"Tendi..." Guz groaned, in the best approximation she could make of that name in her native Mellanish language.
She reformed her eyes. She was a mass of amorphous goo floating in a medical tank.
"Ensign Guz," T'ana said. "Good, you're awake. What were you saying?"
"err... somethig aboud a koala?" Guz said.
"I've been hearing way too much about Koalas lately, I mean what the fuck even is a Koala?" T'ana said. "Anyway, you're basically healed. Your biology is fuckin' nuts. You survived drowning, being vaporized, and being shocked, and a real nasty emergency beam-out. I don't even know how you can beam out a splat of goo that covers an entire wall. You'll be able to go back to duty in three days as long as you return for a checkup then. I'm going to drain the tank now."
"Affirmative," Guz said.
The clear medical gel drained from the tank, leaving just a liquid mass of Guz at the bottom. A slot towards the top of the medical tank's back wall deposited a folded cloth, which fell into the puddle. Guz rose to her feet, donning the garment--a medical gown--and reformed her body, head, hands, and face. The front hatch on the medical tank opened up with a hiss, and Guz stumbled out of the tank.
"And goo girl. Stay out of trouble," T'ana said, sternly, "I don't wanna have to bring this big stupid tank out again."
"Y-yes, doctor. Where's, um, Tendi," Guz said, now in Federation Standard. "I thought I heard Tendi."
T'ana stood back and opened the privacy screen to reveal Rutherford on a biobed, with Tendi standing over him, holding his hand.
Rutherford opened his eyes and turned to face Guz. Then he immediately pulled his hand away from Tendi's.
"Tendi? What? Do we know eachother, hahaha," Rutherford said, unconvincingly.
"Wh-what? No, you're, you--you can't have lost your memories again!" Tendi said. "We're best friends, remember?"
Guz's eyes narrowed.
"Best friends whaa nooo..." Rutherford said, then he sighed. "No. No, no, I'm an idiot, I'm sorry, Tendi, of course I remember you."
"You lied to me," Guz said, as if a neutral observation.
T'ana rolled her eyes at the petty drama, and turned away to go back to her office. "You're dismissed, Ensign Guz."
"What? I'm sure there's just been a misunderstanding," Tendi said.
"It's not what you think!" Rutherford said.
"What I think is that you lied about knowing Tendi so I would open up to you. I'm so stupid," Guz said, more sad than angry.
"Ok it's exactly what you think," Rutherford said. "I'm sorry, Guz, I just... I just..."
Guz stared blankly at Rutherford, and avoiding any eye contact with Tendi, she swiveled 90 degrees, and she walked, stiffly, towards the exit.
"WAIT!" Tendi said.
Guz stopped at the door. It opened up to the corridor.
"I don't know what problems you have with me, but please don't blame them on Rutherford," said Tendi, "I'm sure he was only trying to help, because he wants us all to be friends! Right Rutherford?"
"Uh, yeah!"
"And I want to be friends. So I hope that whatever I did to make you hate me I can make it right."
Guz almost laughed at the irony. She flinched a little.
"So... can we be friends? Please?" Rutherford said. "I'm sorry."
Guz outstretched her arm behind her and gave a thumbs up. Then she pulled her arm back and walked out into the corridor. She had a stressful event or two or three to not think about, a model rocket to get back to, and plenty of time to work on it.