Jordan was alone. Luckily, this was his preferable state.
<"Looks like it's up to us, John. I'm inside and going up. Let's hope I can find whatever wire I have to pull out to shut this bitch down.">
Start climbing, draw gun if I still have it. If there is any important seeming wires within reach, rip them out. Keep going until any possible power source appears within vision.
You start climbing. The inside of the BETA was obviously not designed to be traversed by humans. It might have been a spaceship once, but now it has been transformed and enhanced by the various manufacturing equipment it was carrying into something more akin a human body. As such, you have to resort to hanging onto broken robotic arms and broken pieces of metal supports, grabbing onto molten wires and clinging onto rails, making your way through the various maintenance passageways used by the robotic arms. Your ability makes it too easy.
As you keep climbing upwards like a character out of a Ubisoft game, your surroundings begin to change. They are less damaged now, less burnt. You come across a few robotic arms that jerk around a bit, trying but failing to function.
Finally, you reach the centre of the BETA, a more wide open area that allows you to take a look at your surroundings while you ready your futuristic silenced pistol.
In the centre of the area are two armoured spheres about twice or thrice the height of a human, with a great number of wires connected to them.
There are about a dozen robotic arms in here, moving along their rails and doing various tasks. They're many jointed, a bit bigger in length then your arm and made of plastic and metal, with various sensors and tools attached near their tip.
A few of them are cannibalising parts from the surrounding area and are feeding them into a large cube. The cube in turn provides them with the parts they are using to construct what looks like a robotic arm and leg for one of the spheres and attaching them to it.
The others are working on repairing the surrounding area, working chiefly on reconnecting various wires to the two spheres or laying new wires.
It looks like you haven't been noticed yet.
You're starting to feel tired. You've got maybe about 10 seconds before your ability stops working, if that. After that, you're as good as a normal human. A tired normal human.
<<Shit, it blasted them both? I'm still pretty hurt, so you better stop it from shooting if you can. I've done what I could; trying to patch myself up isn't going well.>>
Try again. Without medical aid I'm not helpful.
You need some aid for your leg. Any aid, you aren't being picky, just got to get something to allow you to walk and make the bleeding stop. Any thing will do.
You focus on the general idea of medical help. Nothing too fancy or complicated, just something helpful, leaving the rest to your subconscious, your instincts, your power, your soul or however you want to call that part of you that causes the lack of control in your powers, your inability to gain precisely what you want unless you hold a complete mental image of what you want and concentrate on it fully. You let your power build within you, gather all the concentration you can muster and then release, only concentrating in keeping your ability working after that.
Small triangular pieces of a copper-coloured metal start materialising near your leg and hovering around it. You are not exactly sure about what kind of leg brace this is going to build or... Wait a second... All those pieces of metal have pointy edges and... the edges are pointing towards your leg.
Before you can make the decision to stop your ability, all the metal shards jerk towards your leg, embedding themselves in the flesh and the part of your bones that are still intact.
You don't scream. You don't feel pain or disgust. It's more of a shock. The sudden realisation that this happened. That you're going to see your leg being butchered right before your eyes.
When the pain eventually comes a fraction of a second later, you manage to block it all like some kind of Zen master, thinking coldly and logically. You can't let your concentration falter now. Whatever your ability is doing, it has just ruined your leg and caused a lot more bleeding. The only thing you can hope for is that when it's done, you'll end up being better than right now. Otherwise, you're as good as dead.
More metal pieces embed themselves in your leg and twist to form links between the metal triangles of varying size, removing most flesh in the process. You close your eyes, focusing solely on maintaining your power. Can't watch. But the sound is still there.
After some time, you feel something twisting around your upper thigh and firmly holding onto it. And then there's nothing. The pain is still there but there is no more change, no more noise.
You open your eyes to see a metal leg with pointy edges in place of your old one, lying besides blood and minced meat, some of it hanging from the crevices formed between some of the triangles. It hangs on to your thigh by means of a metal band that is tightly bent around it, acting as a tourniquet at the same time.
Your multivision helmet allows you to see how the new limb has also latched onto your bone, the metal pieces embedding themselves in it enough to cause friction while not fracturing it. Almost no flesh remains.
You push your torso up with your hands and try moving your newly constructed peg leg experimentally. It pains you to move it too quickly and it is not very flexible, yet it is surprisingly lightweight and durable. Probably not made of copper then, at least not pure copper. The bleeding has almost completely stopped, nothing life threatening for the short term.
((Is this too graphic? I can tone down the detail of the descriptions of injuries if I'm disturbing anyone.
I know the answer is probably no, since this is a forum about dwarf fortress and the injuries there are rather detailed, but my conscience compels me to ask, just in case.))
Rune's crushed corpse twitched, then stopped moving.
Rune sighed. That had HURT. He glanced around, seeing nothing. He tried to contact anything. "Hello? Anyone out there?"
There are many greetings. I have been out here.
<Um...okay...what do you usually do?>
This unit works towards the completion of this unit's objectives.With that helpful little bit of importation information, everything stops.
Player body deemed unrecoverable. Reconnecting with staging area...You wake up in your room in the staging area, lying in your bed. The TV is showing an angry gremlin-like man with a gun tearing some wires and cogs apart.
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Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1148602 times)