Reversal of Fortune

Jamie felt his head loll back as the fatigue hit him. He'd been on duty for a double shift now, and with all the malfunctions caused by the Karma field, he'd been working flat out the whole time. He pulled himself back to his feet with a groan, and jumped down to the corridor below, landing with a soft thump not in keeping with his well-built physique.

Then his phone buzzed. He reached into his pocket, and saw the message from Jade.

"Holly?" He asked. "What's going on in the garden centre where Jade is?" He asked.

"Oh, Faecal matter hit the oscillating device a few minutes ago. There was a fertiliser explosion and some trouble with the mechanical gnomes. Cass is with her."

He opened his mouth to ask when Holly learned such long words, but closed it again, remembering the warning from those scientists. He then toyed with suggesting they were already doomed, given Cass' usual demeanour, but stopped himself again. "I'd better get down there to help." He said instead, and took off at a run.

On the way, he passed so many others having trouble, and had to shout "emergency! coming through!" to get past some of the crowds that had appeared. All hell was breaking loose, all over the ship. At one point, he even had to kick someone hard enough to break a bone to move someone out of an electrified pool of water without getting caught in it himself. Karma obviously didn't know how to react to that, so made a haphazard attempt to trip him up, but he dived over it, rolled, and carried on running.

'If that fertiliser goes off properly,' he thought, 'some rogue gnomes are going to be the least of our problems.'

Meanwhile, Jade crawled out from underneath the petunias as fast as she could, heading for the larger-than-life Talon, now in the throes of aniphylactic shock because of the bee stings. He was lucky that Jade always carried an epi-pen, and jabbed it into him. All the while, the bees stayed away from her, and the tomatoes smacked on the ground around her, leaving her untouched.

Chaos reigned on the promenade, from end to end. The fires from the red-light clubs had spread, and with everyone running away with panicked screams, there were very few people trying to fight the blaze. Jamie came upon it, and stopped to survey the area, and catch his breath.

"Oh hell." he muttered. "Holly!" he called, but there was no reply.

A group of people ran towards him, to get out through the way he'd just come in. He grabbed one of them, who jumped as he did. "When you get out of here, tell Holly to raise the alarms in here. We need everyone out." Then let him go. He had no time to wait to make sure he'd understood, or was actually going to do it.

The Promenade was in much greater trouble around the garden centre. Small explosions burst every few seconds, and tomatoes were flung out to hit people that were trying to run away. Jamie took a deep breath, and headed towards the carnage. He started up a small mantra to himself as he did, "I am going to help people. I am going to help people..." hoping that whatever was causing this Karma effect would allow him to achieve his goal.

As he entered, he saw Jade hiding under a table of flowers, Cass looking like she was in the middle of the worst day of her life, and someone he didn't really know lying in a pool of either blood, or tomato juice, and an epi-pen floating next to him.

"Cass." He said, as he got close enough to be heard over the screams nearby. "Follow me out, and bring Jade with you. Don't say anything, and the Karma effect will keep us safe." he said, and hefted Talon up onto his shoulders, in a fireman's lift. He called out to Jade, and told her to leave with them. Together, they walked carefully out of the garden centre silently, and nothing happened to them.

As they reached the exit, they all shivered as they realised the fires in the red-light clubs had all miraculously gone out. Cass figured it out first.

"Oh, fuck." she said, as she looked at Jamie, who had just selflessly walked into a zone of devastation to save people. Jamie looked back at her, and his mouth began to form the word "what?" as his legs were pulled out from under him, dragging him back towards the fires and carnivorous plants. Talon fell rather unceremoniously to the floor.

Cass turned to Jade. "If I'm right, you should kick him while he's down, or this Karma thing is going to kill you."

<Tag people. The Karma field has just reversed itself!>