[3] Russano manages to understand what his subconscious is suggesting to him--that to use electricity as a shield one must simply use it to vaporize incoming projectiles. This realization makes it easier to get there, but there are still things to be figured out.
(+1 to The Best Defense)
Roll 69
When combat occurs, both attacker and defender roll a dice.
If the attacker rolls higher than the defender, the difference between the rolls determines the amount of damage dealt in terms of injuries. Higher values are better, but even a roll of 4 vs 3 (example) will result in some damage.
If the defender rolls higher than the attacker, the defender might deal a counterattack if he/she is capable and rolls well enough, using the difference as a d6 result.
CHARISMA: Increases all social actions by +1 while equipped. Each point stacks with other sources of charisma.
DEFENSE: Increases your own defense roll when you are hit with an enemy weapon, mitigating your own injuries. Defense does not stack and only your highest defense value will be taken into account.
Deflect Chance: 1 in 6th chance that a light attack (bullets, sword slashes, glancing hits from an axe, punches, sweeping beam, etc) will simply be ignored. Stacks linearly, so 6 deflect chance means that you are immune to conventional attacks.
Parry Chance: Same as deflect chance, but it's a second calculation. If you have two one-handed weapons, both will stack linearly with each other.
DMG: Damage type. Some armors defend against different types better than others.
CRIT: The kind of injury this weapon will do if you roll a base 5, regardless of enemy defense.
CLUMSINESS: When carried, decreases social actions and actions requiring precision, such as long distance weaponry use. Stacks linearly with different items.
STRENGH: Adds to strength-related actions such as moving heavy objects or punching people. Stacks linearly.
Name: Russano Neskratt
Race: Aldros II (Independent Colony)
Abilities: (Active)
-
Breeze of Life -
Flash Portal -
Lightning Bolt -
Twisted Transistor - -
Spell Flux [2/2] -
Universal Clock II -
I Like These Odds (Toggle)Traits: -
Diplomat -
Ironmind -
Warlock -
PsiboundInventory: +
Torque +
Ceremonial Battle Robe (Medium) +
Black Clothing +
Bandages (clothing) (8/8) +
Corsair Rapier +
NightfallConditions:Miniquests:New Power: Cleanse all debuffs (1/5 successful casts)
New Power: The Best Defense (Electric Shield) (2/3 successful casts)
Name: Kenjaro
Race: Cyrian
Abilities: -
Cellular Regeneration - -
Essence Transfer -
Martial Trance - -
Mind Blast - -
Lockdown - -
Emergency FragmentationTraits: -
Bloodlust -
Martial Focus -
Rifles are for CowardsInventory: -
Axellum K12 [15/15] - 1x Shotgun Magazine
+
Stealth Ultrasonic Axe +
Nanosteel Combat Armor (Medium) +
Broken Watchman's Graphite Dagger +
Commander's Landark Industries Powersuit (Heavy) - -
Oktar's Powersuit AugmentsCash: 40150 Ac
Conditions:Miniquests:None
Name: Ryan
Race: Unknown
Abilities: -
Pyrokinesis [0/3] - -
Burnout -
Technopathy [2/3] - -
UPGRADE!!! - -
Uplink -
CleanseTraits: -
Backtrack -
Perception -
Instant Reflexes -
Lack of Common Sense -
AmnesiaInventory: +
Modern Clothes +
Arkfury (6/6)Conditions:Camera Vision (-1 to concentration, +3 to observation)
Miniquests:Discover Power: Ra---o-n
Decrease Effect of Amnesia Trait (1/6 successful persuasions)
Name: Dominic Zoshan
Race: Ross/Polarian
Abilities (Human Form): -
Geokinesis [1/3] - -
Discipline of Form [1/3] - -
Discipline of Strength - -
Hat ThrowingTraits (Human Form): -
Gentleman (1 Gentleman Points) -
Duelist -
Polite -
SerendipityAbilities (Myslef Form): -
Metallokinesis [1/3] --
Seismic Slam --
Bladestorm -
Entropy LeechTraits (Myslef Form): -
Epicenter of Rage (0 Fury)Inventory: -
Gunberd - 20x Gunberd Round
-
☼Gentleman's Grappling Hook☼ -
Armored Burnt Trenchcoat and Top Hat (Light) -
Repair Kit - 3x Large Paper Cup
-- Popcorn
-
=Granite Dagger= - Cryogenics Bay Keys
Conditions:Miniquests:New Ability: Pristine Condition (1/3 successful cases)
The large flat structures on the front and sides are radiators (some of which can be retracted during combat to protect them). There are a lot of ornamental features that function as protection from impacts due to their distance from the relatively narrow central compartment of the ship. The actual part that most of the crew are in is much smaller than the ship itself.
-Coolant and Radiator Control-
-Engineering-
-Weapon Control-
-Water Pumps-
-Cargo-
-Docking/Hangars-
-Engineering-
-Workshops-
-Life Support-
-Cargo-
-Armory-
-Residence (5 levels)-
-Library-
-Bridge-
-Hydroponics-
-Medical-
-Life Support-
-Engineering-
-Engine Control-
superBlast, AKA RyanThe second knight speaks up as you mention your confusion.
"Fear not, I will guide you. As a professor of philosophy and maths, I may be able to give you my insight on your powers... if you tell me what they are first."He speaks with a calm demeanor, having little interest in showing off his skills or flaunting his equipment. His simple armor and loadout seem to reflect this, although you ask him about the scarf which seems out of place.
"My scarf... I prefer not to talk about its origins. It's from a friend, I will leave it at that. I wear it in remembrance of him. Anyway, it's nice to meet you, Ryan, you may simply call me Geronimo as my cohorts do."He calls for a transportation vehicle, which drives off the road in the distance and quickly approaches, its wheels screeching to a halt on the asphalt. As the door swings open and Geronimo approaches the car, you realize that there was nobody inside the driver's seat, or inside the vehicle at all, for that matter. You get inside and marvel at the controls for a bit, [4] all the while resisting the urge to invade its electronics with your powers.
You rest against the seat, your borrowed pressurized shirt and pants itching slightly along your arms and legs. The vehicle rolls smoothly along the road, taking gradual turns along the many winding streets and raised driveways throughout the city. From a distance, the city looked quite modern and artificial, but as you came closer you've come to realize that the city's layout is heavily based around the gentle rolling hills of the countryside. While changes in elevation are smooth and gradual, the city closely resembles a topographic map with many levels of stores, walkways, and roads. Platforms over the peaks of the hills act as plazas, where citizens rally for social events, fairs, and occasionally protests against the Queen and her right to rule.
At the highest points of the city's ground level is where the skyscrapers begin to rise up out of the ground. Surrounded by a dense network of highways and ramps, each skyscraper blends into a great maze resembling three-dimensional Tetris blocks layered over each other and acting as supports. Towering columns of solid steel hold up suspension cables that keep the whole thing from crashing down. Up ahead, you see a large sign advertising Arcas University. It features a modified version of the royal Coat of Arms, its two snake's heads coiled through a mobeus strip. Geronimo pulls into the driveway, climbing up a spiraling path up to the skyscraper level. After reaching the campus, he stops the car along the side of the road and steps out while leaving it running. You reluctantly step out of the vehicle, completely taken aback by how cars are automated inside this hellish maze. The car locks itself and heads on its own to the parking garage up ahead, a multi-story building that stretches back down into the depths below. You stay away from the handrails over the edge, for fear of having nightmares in your sleep.
Inside the university, Geronimo goes on to lead you through the almost-empty halls of the older Arcas Magus building. This particular structure dates back to the founding of Aterrus. Originally built on ground level, the structure was lifted up to its current elevation, as were most Aldrosian buildings at the time. The city was built with full intentions of having structures that could be moved onto more stable foundations, as drilling infrastructure was not yet ready to prepare the groundwork for one of the largest burgs on the planet. And despite all this, Aterrus was still not the largest burg on Aldros II! Feudal lords constantly vie for the prestige and glory of having the largest burg on the planet, with the record being broken an average of once per month. The concept of burgs dates back to when Aldros II was still in its undeveloped, decentralized state, just as the current ruling family forged the title of Planetary Emperor. Since every lord was now a vassal of the Queen, they turned to less violent ways of showing off their strength and progress, building huge city-states that rivaled all but the most densely occupied independent cities.
"So..." Geronimo begins.
"This building is where the first formal research into the mysteries of human psionics was conducted. Willing volunteers would sign up and flood the halls, waiting for inexperienced professors to classify their abilities of varying strengths and build a pseudoscience around it. To be truthful, Psionics is still largely a pseudoscience. It is up to us philosophers to make sense of the things it implies. In the end, it's just another mystery of the Order."
He asks you about your powers.
"So, you say you have psionic talent. Would you mind explaining briefly what you can do?"
You brush off Hadrial's offer of help, and storm off into the city, determined to find a shop owned by like-minded people.
The city's lower level resembles a set of hills, arranged layer-by-layer with lower floors having a larger cross-sectional area. You aren't sure if there are people beneath your feet as you walk by, since you aren't an engineer. The structural limitations of modern materials elude you... for now.
[4] After only an hour of browsing shop signs and maps of the so-called "villages"--communities and virtual towns inside the valleys formed by the city's layout, underneath the crowded plazas that stretch over the gaps--you catch sight of a dream come true: the sign reads "The Gentleman's Corner: High End Bar and Department Store for the High Class"
As you quickly stroll to the entrance, a Gentleman greets you at the door.
"How do you do?"
"How do you do?"
The man bows and steps off to the side, allowing you to enter. You step inside and are astonished at the sheer class of the place. The entire interior is modeled after an ancient Victorian-era store, with every detail carefully researched and documented. The amount of research the store-owners have done is extraordinary. It almost rivals your own studies on the matter! Here you could buy anything, including the many things modern technology has rendered obsolete. For example, genuine animal soap was difficult to find in these times, primarily since raising animals in space presents major logistical challenges.
You step past the entrance to the Victorian bar and make your way to the middle of the store, where they sell suits, ties, and office toys. After a brief exchange of greetings, you ask one of the employees if there was a chance of buying some sort of equipment for combat and espionage. After all, it was a harsh world outside the doors of the shoppe, and many people die in ways that could easily have been prevented had the right people not been angered. The employee directs you to the back of the store, where your eyes immediately fall upon a majestic piece of equipment: a wrist-mounted grappling hook, with a carbon nanofibre cable and monocrystalline iron hook! The spring-powered mechanism can be cranked by simply plugging the device into a power source or manually turning the axle with an ornate brass key.
Your sense of decency compels you to purchase the fine piece of work. Eager to try it out, you bid the shopkeeper farewell and head out.
Seeing as Hadrial most likely knows the markets around here, having all sorts of fancy stuff only a medieval reenactment store could sell, you ask him to build you through the markets. He brings his own car, automated like Geronimo's. This one contrasts with the sleek lines of Geronimo's blue and white electric vehicle. Hadrial's means of transportation is a gas-powered behemoth, riddled with air intakes and heatsinks. The vehicle drives itself to his side, its tires screeching to a halt.
"Feel free to ride with me. I'll take you to one of the bigger plazas."Riding inside the car isn't as rough as it first seemed. Unlike Cyrian technology, the vehicle is modeled after Ross civilian models. Of course, the Ross homeworld has an unbreathable atmosphere comprised mostly of neon--it works quite well as a heatsink. The air intakes on this vehicle seem a bit superfluous, but considering that Aldros II is fairly close to the borders of Ross space, you understand why. Cyrian military technology is usually self-contained, relying on its environment only for opportunistic resupply. Fighting on a moon with methane lakes and rain, for example, means that Cyrian shock mechs can simply refuel almost anywhere at will since they are designed to use methane as a fuel. They tend to be larger and 'clunkier' than other house's military hardware, and especially civilian hardware.
Finding a place to sell off equipment is difficult in a place like this. Walking into a store and setting down a machine gun on the table can't possibly leave a good impression. A pawn shop seems like a worthwhile place to get rid of the dagger, while the radio can go to a recycling center, you conclude.
[4] The nanosteel dagger fetched a hefty price at the pawn shop. After checking with different stores to make sure you're getting the best price possible, you sold it for quite a bit to fill your pockets with. Crafting nanosteel weaponry and armor is a painstaking process, requiring exotic materials as well as time and patience. Weaving graphene sheets in between plates of hot metal and them hammering it all together evenly is more difficult than it looks, especially since each job requires the steel to be made specifically for the project in question. You've tried your hand at it once, but the final product was nowhere near the quality or performance of a master smith's work.
+40000 Ac (Aldrosian currency)
[4] The radio contained some salvageable parts. Nothing too spectacular, but since the parts are already built and in good condition it doesn't hurt to put them inside a kid's toy or something. You aren't sure if the radio is still tuned to the Van Buren Company's channels, but that doesn't seem important to you.
+150 Ac
((Note that cash values are heavily dependent on character background. I choose not to provide in depth cost catalogs of store items since the numbers are all arbitrary in the end. Feel free to buy what you want.))
You next ask to be directed to an enchanter to find out what these people can do for you. It sounds like an interesting concept, although the institutionalization of psionics on this world seems strange to you.
You walk into "Cloak and Dagger: Enchantments," and make your way to the empty counter to wait for the shopkeeper.
After about two minutes of waiting, you hear a sudden "Boo!" from behind the counter. You look up and see a bald man wearing a chainmail coif and black cape having mystically appeared, smiling with amusement. Given that you barely flinched, the man's smile quickly fades and takes on a more serious tone.
"What can I do for you today sir? I'm willing to see what I can do for strangers, although if you've never had an enchanted weapon before please speak up. Got any weapons?"
Halano's magic stopped all time for the prisoner just before a knife impacted the prisoner's skull. The knife was recovered, you might want to have a look at that as well. Halano was thrust against the wall as soon as one of the assailants entered the room, breaking his spine from the force. The assailants made no effort to kill anyone directly, though. It was terrifying, to say the least, knowing that these people could very well slaughter thousands but chose not to."Perfectio sets his head down in anguish.
"Hey," says Jo.
"Looks like I'll be driving you and Perfectio."You pile into the bus along with Jo, Perfectio, and the rest of the royal guard. They take you to the palace. You salute to the two Eternal Watch--more accurately, a man and a woman willingly engineered to have perfect alertness and never sleep, for the good of the Empire. Together, they keep watch over the palace entrance. At first one would believe they would get bored, but with Aterrus... every time you see it, you feel like you're seeing something new. The skyline is ever-changing, with new projects coming up while others get moved. The gardens in front of the palace are regularly swapped out, introducing various alien lifeforms each season. And to top it off, the fountain is a different color every hour, constantly cycling through the colors of the rainbow.
You walk through the sacred hall, decorated in traditional Gothic style and featuring various symbols and pictures relating to the faith of the Aldrosian people (Aldros' official church and religion is descended from the ancient Eastern Orthodox church. Things have changed, philosophically. In this view, God is commonly referred to as the Order, relating to the mathematical order found in nature.). You notice scorch marks along the floor, most likely from the attack Perfectio mentioned. You ask him about this.
"Yes, indeed. Those marks are there from one of the four assailants. We have a number of clues that may help us trace their activities, and the data you secured from the Van Buren company is going to fill in some gaps in our knowledge. It might shed some light on who these people are.
They weren't just mindless killers. They were highly organized and moved as a group of four, never leaving each other's backs. Each one was a psion with a unique power. Their synergy was just... too much for us to handle. From what we've gathered, one of them was responsible for blackout our our entire electrical grid, including closed networks. The whole palace was without power for the rest of the day, although curiously the medical wards stayed online. They must have planned for that."
After a fine drink to celebrate your own successes, you head to the interrogation chamber in which the messenger is kept, discussing politics and science with your companions. Followed by Perfectio and Jo, with weapons drawn in case the assassins return, you walk in and examine the messenger .
The messenger is seated in the chair, his skin a silvery white due. You ask Perfectio if he has any idea why. He pauses, not knowing what to say. Jo interrupts his thoughts.
"As an educated man, surely you've heard of thermodynamics? The light can't impart any heat to his body--he's trapped in time. That means no change in energy."
Perfectio objects.
"What about momentum? Light imparts momentum, though little of it."
"I don't know. Push him over."
You lightly tap the messenger's body with your hand. He tips slightly. When you release, the body wobbles back and forth in the chair, infinitely rigid.
Author
Topic: RTD 3 -- Space Wizards for Real (Read 66890 times)