"Better safe than sorry," Kelly says, with a wink that is less than reassuring. "Just lock yerself in, don't fret. Dunno if that overheating thing buys me, doesn't seem very likely... we'll see."
Also, as a note- all the crewmembers are still carrying they're armaments unless they chose not to. Only the passengers are unarmed.
"My neck," Phillip says to the Doc, stretching himself.
Harmony, unsettled further by the wink, gets up to close the door and says "Yes, Captain..." Once he leaves, she closes the cockpit door, locks it, and then goes back to her seat, activating the magnetic lock on the door, as well. Then, she pulls back up the diagnostic screen.
"Damn Windows Mesa... Service Pack 3 was supposed to speed these diagnostics up, not slow them down..." she mutters, before starting to perform her own diagnostic, in addition to the automated one.
Two successes, Kenneth. You do not think he pulled anything in his neck, perhaps just twinged the muscles. Pills for the pain would probably be all you would perscribe for this, and maybe to tell him to toughen up.
Three successes, Harmony. You were right about the emergency overheat procedure; in the event that things start getting too hot, plasma will be vented to cool things off. And it turns out that the emergency protocol was triggered! But... the various engine systems are not overheated...
Harmony checks her results, then checks them again. Then, she gets up and makes sure the door to the cockpit is locked, before taking a seat and staring at the results for a second. She reaches for the headset, only to realize she is already wearing it, and then turns it on, messaging the Captain. While she talks, she starts trying to track down the triggering component, or otherwise finding the source of the emergency protocol; what set it off? Or, if nothing did, which terminal was it set off from? "Captain, you were right! Something triggered the emergency overheat protocol, but temperature readings were normal!"
(I'd like to make a roll for uncovering the trigger)
"Can't talk now," the Captain says to Marina as he heads back towards the engine with Alan.
Phillip winces but takes the bottle from you. "Do you have a lot of these things on board?" he asks.
Another good Fix-It roll from Harmony says that she finds the terminal that did it. The ship computer says that... the terminal used was the one that you are currently using to do this check.
Harmony, already rather terrified at the prospect of being on the drift with a potential saboteur onboard, is pushed to near panic by this revelation. She tries to dig up when the event was triggered- maybe it had been programmed early, and set to a time delay? She'd been using the console when the whole thing happened, and unless she accidentally installed the 'blow your ship's engine up and stop in the middle of deep space' app on her Spacebook page without meaning to, someone is trying to cover their tracks and set her up.
"This shouldn't have happened," Alan mutters, more to himself then Kelly, as they head to the engine room. "Everything was fine when I last checked up on them... It couldn't have been the hard burn, the Gan Ying can easily handle it... I think... Unless I made a mistake, but I'm sure I would have noticed something that'd result in a complete shut down of the engines... Right?"
I want an observation roll once we've arrived at the engine room, just to see what, if anything, is broken.
It is nonsense, of course, Harmony- you WERE on this console the entire time! Nobody has touched it but you! The emergency protocol was triggered only seconds before what the protocol entails happened- the venting of plasma leading to the near-stopping of the ship.
"I don't think it was your fault, kiddo," Kelly says to you, Alan. "You're one of the best mechanics I've ever met. I think someone screwed with us."
First thing you notice, Alan, is that it is eerily quiet in the engine room as everything has shut down. The red emergency lighting is on, too. You do not see any immediate signs of damage.
Harmony squeals and jumps a little in her seat when Alan speaks into the intercom- she was so focused on disproving her own guilt that she forgot about the headset. "Sorry. Caught me by surprise..." She says, desperately hoping the intercom didn't catch her shock. "Um... well, they're still checking tertiary subsystems in the main drives, but overall, it looks like everything is fine. Just... not responding. It looks like someone's stolen control of the ship, shut us down, and locked us out without disabling the actual ship... Even the emergency overheat was artificially triggered..." She deliberately leaves out from where, of course...
"I'm gonna try a full reboot... but in case that doesn't work, we should probably work on isolating critical systems from the computers and hooking them up to an external tablet... We'd lose navsat and cortex access, but neither of those will keep us from getting where we're going."