OOC:

Kyrus Hassar
Combat Engineer
Level 1: Electrical Systems
Story 1: Basic Electronics/Wiring

Kyrus Hassar had been gone for a ling time. Back when he was in Paladin squad, he had made the announcment that he was going on leave, for personal reasons. He had planned on returning only a few months later, but as usual, things didn't go according to plan. He had ended up being gone longer than he had expected and upon his return, he had the misfortune of discovering that his squad had been disbanded and dispersed between the remaining squads. However, as dismal as the situation appeared, Kyrus took pleasure in hearing that he was assigned into the ronowned elite squad, Blackjack. He had heard many things concerning them in his time with Paladin, and he looked foward to working with them.

For now, he was off duty. He was waiting for his next assignment, and in the meantime, he decided he would be better off doing something with his time rather than aimlessly wandering around.

As he surveyed his room, the thought came to him that he had yet to boot up his old T-3 unit. He had gotten it shortly before his leave, and he had opted to leave it behind. Kyrus glance towards the far corner of the living room, where his faithful droid was positioned in front of a terminal. Kyrus had left him there to stay charged and connected to his home's security system.

Walking over to it, he greeted the little droid, "Rise and shine, sunshine!" He proceeded towards the terminal and pressed the power button. The screens vacant screen stayed put. Kyrus frowned. He could see no reason for the computer to be unwilling to at least power on.

He looked back down at his feet to find that his droid shared his terminal's indisposition. This was definately a problem. He quickly checked and saw that all the lights were working throughout the rest of his house. It seemed to be only the appliances that were connected to the living room's far wall were powerless. Sighing, Kyrus hoped that this would simply be a matter of replacing the outlet.

He went down on his knees and removed the access panel on the wall, and was greeted with the sight of wires coming from every direction and gathering into the center, where they were all attached to a main console. The console was decorated with an assortment of lights, and a few unmarked buttons directly beneath a small screen that displayed different statistics about each wire that it was connected to. To his dismay, he saw that almost half of those numbers were zero's.

Well at least some of them are still working. That means that its a problem with the wires themselves. Huh. Well, that shouldn't take that long to fix.

Kyrus stood up and walked into his bedroom and took out a small toolkit that he kept in his closet. Then he returned to the access panel and set his his toolkit down next to him. When he sat down crossed-legged and look at the console again, he blinked in suprise. Two more of the wires were displaying a current of zero. "You gotta be kriffin' kidding me..." he complained. This was starting to get ridiculous.

He was about to give up and call in an electrician to replace the whole whole thing, when something caught his eye. A thin green wire had given a slight twitch. Kyrus knew he hadn't touched anything, so he pulled out his glowrod from the toolkit and investigated the little mystery. Holding the glowrod as far into the panel as he could manage, he peered into it. He visually traced the green wire further into the complex of circuits. At the extent of the illumination cast by the glowrod, burrowed into the frail wire was a line creeper.

Kyrus leaned back and let out a long exasperated groan. How in the worlds did I manage to get a line creeper? This was going to be really anoying. He tried to think of all the ways hat a line creeper could have made it's way into his house. Could it have come from the neighbor? It's possible. Maybe I somehow brought it back unknowingly? Line creepers tended to be on space ships but occasionally a few managed to infect someones electronic devices.

He decided to worry about the how later, and decided to focus on getting rid of it, first. Shining the glowrod in the open panel, he looked at the creep once more. Line creepers drew energy from current running throught the wires and circuits. They were usually clustered around the main source of energy. This one was small, so it must of just gotten there recently.

Kyrus squeezed his fingers in the narrow space provided and gignerly pulled the creep off of the wire. Grimacing he brought it over to his kitchen and set it inside a cup. 

He had learned long ago from his old smuggling buddy, Rod, a trick on how to get rid of them. When Rod's ship had been overrun with line creepers, he had abruptly shut off all the power in his ship. This was the first step to disengage the creepers from their power sources. Then he had directed all power to one of his engines. With this being the only power source on the ship, naturally the worms were drawn to it. Rod had told him that the pests died shortly after exposure to salt water.

Kyrus remembered watching the final stages of the extermination process with Rod. They both had sat in silence for a good hour, staring at the lonely lights emanating from the engine. Finally, Rod had pointed and said. "Look. You can see them nasty little buggers, just slimin' their way across the floor. Hrmmph. Not on my watch, they don't." He stood up and hauled the big bucket of water to where the majority of the creeps were making their way across. Rod splashed the contents of the bucket all across the floor. Stepping back he nodded and admired his handywork. "Hehe. Look at 'em wiggle!" Indeed, they did squirm in silent agony as the acidic water burned them to death.

Fillng the glass that contained the creep full of water, he set iton the table and slowly poured table salt into it. The effects were the same, and the worm started writhing in a series of convulsions before it finally grew still.

Kyrus dumped the cup out into the sink and filled it back up again with the same salt water solution. He then walked back to the panel and set the glass down on top of his tool kit. Looking inside the panel, he pressesd the menu button on the console window. He was greeted with a list of options and he chose the one that allowed him access to the direction of current flow. Another stats screen showed that the few wires left that were conducting electricity were sending the power to the console, since the creepers had already drained the power coming out of the circuit board. Kyrus rerouted the power from the remaining wires, so that they were sending power out. Finally, he got up and went to the main circuit breaker at the back of his house, bringing his glowrod with him. He turned off all the power in his house except for the outlet next to his terminal in the living room.

No sooner had he done this, than the room was emersed into a sea of darkness. Kyrus flicked on the switch to activate the glowrod and a path was illuminated before him. He made his way back to the living room and sat down in front of the panel and turned off his light. Now, the only source of light came from the small console window.

He only needed to wait for fifteen minutes before the first of the line creeprs appeared around the glowin screen. After a few more minutes, when it seemed like all the worms had gathered there, Kyrus reached over and picked up the glass cup. In one swift motion, he splashed the water in the panel. Shining his light, he seemed to have gotten all of the creepers. Satisfied, he went back to the circuit breaker and restored all the power to the house.

Returning once more to the open panel, Kyrus sat down and retrieved From his toolkit a roll of engine tape. It only took him a few minutes to fix the green wire that the line creeper had been feeding on. When he was all done, he wiped his hands off and looked back at the concole readout. All of the wires were were now connected and each one was running at a hundred percent.

To his right, his old T-3 droid powered back up again and looked around. When his small optical eye rested on him, it let out a happy trill in greeting. Chuckling, Kyrus said, "Its good to have you back."

He stood up and T-3's head followed him as he sat down in front of his terminal. He pressed the power button, and it hummed to life. Happy with his work, Kyrus leaned back in his chair. Then he frowned.

"Blast it, I can't remember what I came over here for."