Star Trek: Starbase 777 - mysterious-vault

The vault was a giant door, locked, naturally. There was a little console on the side that one could use to try and unlock it. Alternatively there was always brute force as an option but it would take a lot of force to get this open and simple phasers would not be enough if they were to choose that option...

They approached the console. Was this another password situation? Maybe it was just Bacon again.

“Oooh! Dibs!” Vara’s eyes lit up with dollar signs as she rushed to the control and looked at it. “What’s the deal what’s the deal?”

The console displayed the following puzzle. One needed to solve for A-B-C-D. The answers were numerical, from 1-9.

"If the first one's a word column... what if this one was s sodoku puzzle?" Maya suggested before she went to the console itself "DO FUCK IT IS SODOKU!"

“Quick, how do you play this?” She said, pointing at Maya.

It was indeed Sudoku!

"You have a grid of numbers, you have to put in the blank spaces, a number that is not present in neither the same column or row that blank space is on" Maya explained "My grandma made me play these as a kid.... and I hated maths..." (edited)

“So wait. D is 1 right?” She said, pointing at D. “And C is….2?”

"There is no maths. This is just a game of logic," Alizati said as he pointed to the numbers.

"Is A also 2?" They vaguely knew the rules of this game, but not exactly this game - more like a Vulcan version that had evolved to fill the same niche. Vulcans loved puzzles.

"We should probably be putting these answers in the console, no?" Alizati said looking at Vara who was up by the console.

Vara nodded, quickly putting 1 for D, 2 for C, and 2 for A. “Let’s see here then.”

"B could be 9" Maya offered

"That would be a logical choice," Alizati nodded, very proud of Maya as a fellow engineer!

"I think B might be nine - yes." Other people talked faster than them.

Vara heard that and hit 9 for B. “B and 9, historians will say they were just roommates.”

It was CORRECT! The vault opened to reveal a stash of stolen weapons from the KDF and Romulan Republic. There were also tons of gifts seemingly from fans, with gamer chairs, pillows, some cool RGB keyboards and headsets. Along with some gifts from the D'Deridex energy company! It seemed like this league had a lot of fans, but they never gave any of the gifts to the players...

5

“Shit! I thought there was going to be like, gold in here. People in vaults is so 22nd century.” She said with a shake of her head.

"HAH! DYSLEXIA COULD SUCK IT!" Maya said triumphantly as the doors opened "...Can I keep a gamer chair?" She asked Alizati, knowing the logical response of no.*

1

"Ensign, there are no people in there?.." Where did she get that idea?

"No," Alizati said in a deadpan voice.

There was no one else in the vault, just tons of gamer stuff and stolen weapons.

"Okay..." Maya sighed, she already knew that one, but it was worth the try

A faint lip-twitch of amusement. "You'd have to carry the chair out of here, you know."

1

“Oh, I thought they were behind all the gamer shit. Now there that is just a waste of a vault! This is storage closet level stuff!” She said with a pout.

"These are not ours. We should leave this here." He wasn't sure what he was hoping for, but, well. "What now?"

"Return the gifts to sender and destroy the weapons I guess?" Maya suggested with a shrug

"We have some engineers, we can disable the weapons. There are a lot of weapons though, we need a way to .. disable them all at once," Alizati said, looking at the weapons around the room.

Dezyim frowned. “Could we maybe send out some sort of electromagnetic pulse to fry them? I guess that’d fry our weapons too, though….” He furrowed his brows while he thought about it.

"There's people who specialise in disposing of this sort of thing. We could probably send them in afterward." It was like those bomb disposal units, but for weapons.

"Set of an EM blast and brick all of them at once? Dump them in the ocean outside us and waterlog them?" Maya spitballed suggestions and noticed a disruptor "We can rig one of the disruptors to explode everything in the vault and just, run."

All of the weapons were currently off. They were a mix of Klingon and Romulan disruptors, a few Krenim time-weapons. Since they were all from different factions, they had a different frequency needed to completely disarm them.

"We should probably return the weapons to their owners, actually," Allan said, sort of just scanning the room with his PADD real quick to document it quickly. "Right? Destroying them seems a bit... extra," he said when Maya suggested .. that.

"Maybe Maya's plan can work. EM pulse to brick them and I am sure they can be reactivated. We should keep them as evidence though, not destroy them," Alizati told the group.

She skipped over to one of the time weapons. “Ooooh, think about how much I could get for you on the open market.” She said as her eyes flashed with cartoon dollar signs.

2

3

"If they can be reactivated, is there really a point to bricking them like that, though?" He asked, tilting his head a bit to the side.

"There is no telling what destruction trying to explode them would cause. We could send the whole facility crumbling," Iviaan frowned, looking up over his head. "An EM pulse sounds fine, however. I should probably move away, so my hoverchair does not disable itself.."

"How about we use the time weapons to return them? like the disruptor explosion plan, but with time and send them back yo before they were stolen??" Maya suggested to Allan, and then let out a sigh of relief when Alizati gave his thumbs up to bricking them because she didnt want to work with time today "We Are not. Selling them." Maya said sternly to Vara

She put the weapon down and put her hands behind her back as she moved away from the weapon. “You’re so right Maya, you know it! No retirement money for me…”

"If I recall, the Krenim weapons wipe targets literally out of existence. So an object shot would never have existed," Alizati told Maya, explaining how Krenim weaponry worked.

"We? Don't need retirement money? We do that for free???" Was Ensign Zh'rahlor in another dimension or something?.. Nevermind, he wouldn't engage. He vroooomed backwards so as to, hopefully , not get sniped by the EM pulse.

1

"....no timey wimey adventures then, got it" Maya said with a thumbs up, choosing to not deal with sass right now. "Welp, theres the process of using one weapon to perma brick their brothers. Like we can set the krenim one to brick the krenim weapons and a klingon brick the Klingon weapons"

"An EMP is also gonna wipe our other shit, too, like our PADDs and whatnot, just, um- to make that clear," he added, "I say we just lock off the room when we leave it, right? With our own system? And then we can sort it out back to the KDF and Republic later?"

"No use selling weapons or worthless gold bars or bricking any weapons. My suggestion is that we change the password so only we can access the vault and then give that password to the weapons disposal... What Allan just said, basically." Damnit, onion, type faster!

2

"That seems doable. We can activate an EMP burst and leave the room, as if we were doing a rentogen," Alizati said, curiously using the Japanese term for x-ray, he was technically Japanese!

“I mean, I ain’t retiring on one of your federation planets.” She said simply.

"It's safer to just not do the EMP burst at all-" he was temporarily distracted by what Vara said and he blinked a few times before he finished his sentence, "right? Just do what Thalass said instead?"

"We can set off a timer and get out of the vault. Maybe the thicc doors might be enough to shield our stuff" Maya suggested "I thought most of the federation didnt use currency anymore"

"Perhaps make the password something more secure? I am also unsure if the authorities here have a master key of sorts.." He mentioned, looking around at all the stuff.

"Yeah, boss, we can make it something a little more secure than a sudoku puzzle," he said with a smile. "We can just blow the master key clean out, too."

Misread that as estrogen. Very confused for a minute. "I think we should set the password to 'coelacanth'." Maybe try a password they'll remember.

“Yeah and your a bunch of weirdos for that. The Ferengi may be working off a long history of institutionalized misogyny but at least they know a thing or two about money.” She said. “Coelacanth…” She mumbled.

"Don't make the password bacon!" Chris spoke up, still VERY sad that was one of the passwords.

"That's an idea. We'll have to add about a hundred symbols and other things into it, but it's a great idea, uhhh, I can make it a regex, how 'bout that? Coelacanth regex." He shrugged. He was gonna go with a meme, anyways, but coelacanth sounded fun.

Dezyim’s mouth flattened into a hard line. “We could do that trick where you come up with a phrase and use the first letter of each word as the password. To make it harder to guess but easier for us to remember.”

"And then make that a regex," he said with a grin and tapped his forehead. Very silly.

“Right yeah that’s very smart.” She said with a nod, pulling out her padd. “Lemme just write that down…”

“I think if we’re going to try to return them to their owners, it’s a waste to force ourself to explode the vault later just to be able to get into it because we choose a password we wouldn’t be able to remember.” He let out a little laugh and narrowed his eyes after Allan spoke. “Lieutenant Allen, are all of your passwords regexes?”

"The Federation doesn't use currency because we can print gold bars. Even latinum is valued for its scarcity only by civilisations that over-value scarcity." They turned to Allan. "What is a regex?" It sounded like some sort of dinosaur. Tyrannosaurus Regex. (edited)

2

"Huh? No, I can remember a really good regex. A regex is like, an expression that kinda... oh, man, how do I explain it in non-technical terms, uhhh... it basically notes how to include a bunch of different variations of something in one coding phrase...? Ish? Like, I've made one for different spellings or similar sounding to my name that are like, also different officers here, it's, um - it's basically a bunch of symbols and letters and stuff but I promise, it uh, checks out." He tried to explain, he really did, and then he laughed at what Dezyim had asked him. "Nah, that'd be too easy. My BCARS password used to be one, though."

"Let us quickly decide a password. It does not have to be super secure as I can imagine the other team is close to freeing the prisoners and we are close to engineering," Alizati said, glancing at Chris who had the map.

"That's right, engineering is close, we can take #da-nang-tubes or #corridor-02 ," Chris told the team with a hopeful smile.

He grinned. “If you changed it… we could use your old BCARS one. If you still remember it, that is. It’s a whole lot easier than coming up with a new one.”

"Sure. I'll put in a regex, then?" He went back around to the console and went ahead and wiped the sudoku puzzle password off so he could replace it with a new one. "Hmmm, you know what? Sure. I'll put that in, but I'll put coelacanth in, just for fun." And so he entered it in: N[3eE]v[3eE]rG[0oO]nn@[G6g]![v3eE]C[0oO]3l[@aA]c[@aA]nthUp!|N[3eE]v[3eE]rG[0oO]nn@L[3eE]tC[0oO]3l[@aA]c[@aA]nthD[0oO]wn!.

"Alright then, shall we proceed? Tubes or corridor? I would imagine our presence is known so perhaps the tubes are guarded now too?" He thought aloud, looking to see where the tubes hatch was.

They'd done it. They'd created the most incomprehensible password. "I prefer the corridor. I am slow in the tubes." Crawling with one arm did that to you.

"I am fine with the corridor," Alizati told the team, not really having a preference either way, but would much rather fight in a corridor than the tubes.

She wrote down on her padd “bring bombs if steal.” before turning to the time. “Yeah let’s go!”

3

“Yeah, if the tubes are guarded and we take them we’d practically be sacrificing the person first in line. I say corridor.” He reached for his phaser, and double checked it to make sure it was on stun.

"Corridors it is, then," Allan agreed, making sure the password was set into place and he'd properly wiped the previous interface (which would include the master key, probably) out of the system before he went with the rest of the group.

"Let's go #corridor-02 !" Chris said, staying behind the team with Iviaan like before since he was still a lil tired and he needed to rest his purbly piggy body.