((
Got nostalgic. Have some music. Semi-relevant, if you're into RTS games, Petroglyph is making a new one that looks fun:
Grey Goo))
"Guess I'm going to need another push."
Try to get up onto a piece of furniture and jump onto the sphere to climb up towards the target.
Your jump on a nearby pile of broken furniture (looks like half a door laying on some kind of counter, forming a ramp) and try to jump on top of the sphere. You almost make it, but you can't quite reach the top. You use your spear (it embeds itself in it with surprising ease, cutting through the material like butter) and your legs to latch onto the sphere (seeing as your other arm is broken and you can't use it to hold on). You're about to try climbing it when you notice your target moving, trying to slip past you and get away. You're not going to let it do that.
You groan and jump towards it. Realising what's going on, it turns to face you, but can't do much to stop you. You can't reorient your spear in time for you to hit it, but you manage to land on it, pinning it down.
You're face to face now, you can feel its body under yours, cold metal and plastic wires mixed with warm flesh, you can see its face, with a surprisingly human mouth yet lacking any eyes, only smooth plastic and metal in the upper portion of its face.
But face to face is hardly the optimal range to be in when using a spear as a weapon.
Gah, those entities, are they completely stupid? Why did it have to be a spear? Why couldn't it be a knife?
You can hear the buzz of a jetpack's engines behind you.
It'll have to do.
Jetpack straight for the sphere, and prepare to stabby stabby.
Death by bleeding postponed for another minute, you fly onwards to your objective, through the hole in the façade of the building in front of you and inside its ruined interior.
When you reach it, said objective seems to be lying under Jordan, at least for the moment.
It's a strange thing when you look at it with your multivision helmet. It seems to have been human sometime in the past, female judging by the bone structure, but now it is a mix of flesh and machine, much of its limbs and some of its organs replaced by synthetic counterparts. The only skin remaining on her is near her mouth and upper torso (probably because with a cursory scan, it looks like the synthetic replacements that were meant to provide nutrition have not been completely implanted yet), the rest of her face (but not her brain) having been replaced by a metal and plastic helmet-like thing, multiple cameras hiding beneath a smooth sheet of sturdy plastic, while the rest of her limbs have been replaced by robotic prosthetics, the rest of her torso covered in armour and wires going into her skin.
So, now, what do you do?
Elsewhere...
"Nice tattoos. I'm thinking of getting some of my own."
Check what tools I have in my knives. Just the standard stuff?
"Do you know what I can do?"
Try to get a better look at her weapons.
"Lets fight."
Nikolai copies her fighting pose, and he also copies her smile, not that anyone can tell with his mask on.
For now don't attack, back up and try to avoid and dodge if she attacks.
((Is she one of the characters you used to test the system?))
((Sort of. She's got the stats of a simple test NPC but her appearance is based off of one of your entitiy's past acquaintances and the weapons I just came up with when you asked for a Swiss army knife while I was trying to think like your entity.))
"
Nice tattoos. I'm thinking of getting some of my own."
Her grin gets even wider (something you didn't believe was quite possible) but she remains silent and continues slowly walking towards you, spinning her weapons while looking straight at the lenses of your gas mask. You don't give in to temptation to return the stare, but instead you focus on analysing her stance and her weapons, getting ready for her eventual attack.
Which proves fortuitous, since it allows you to notice her slightly twist her thumb and index finger on the rods, flipping a hidden switch. In response, light spreads from the rod to her arms, making her tattoos glow faintly with their respective colour, gold and red for fire and cool cyan for ice. The same faint coloured glow spreads from the wires to the ends of her weapons. When it reaches the end, each multitool flares brightly with its respective colour. The way she spins them around, she looks a lot like a fire poi dancer right now, getting ready for her deadly performance.
Maybe she liked your compliment?
You look at your own weapon of choice. Well, yours don't have any fancy lights or wires to spin them on. On the other hand, your two multitools combined have pretty much most common tools you could think of. Screwdriver/bottle opener, saw/file, compass, hook, corkscrew, mini-scissors, mini-pliers,... It's a bit surprising they managed to fit so much stuff on it while keeping it small and light, honestly. I mean, it doesn't have everything, but it has a lot.
On top of that, each has a knife that looks quite sharp and long (for something that can fit in your palm, anyway). You could cause some damage with the knives alone, either by stabbing or cutting something vital.
"
Do you know what I can do?"
"I don't need to." she replies. Her accent sounds strange. She drags the vowels out, like she is unsure about which syllable comes next, while her non-human teeth make it difficult for her to pronounce consonants like D, T and F. Definitely not built for speaking English.
As for her weapons, even though she is not spinning them around very quickly, they are moving a bit too fast for you to make out any details, and any detail that you could catch is obscured by the glow of the implement. However, from what you remember from when she was first summoned, they both look a lot like normal Swiss army knives, only they're a bit bigger than the ones you have and a bit more angular. They're also grey and have small round lights embedded in them. But that's mostly cosmetic changes. On the tool part, your memory fails you. You remember they had fewer tools than yours and you remember some things about which tools they had (like that they both had knives and that one of them had what looked like a hook while another had something like a sewing needle) but not much else. And then there are those rods she's holding. It's obvious they have some sort of control mechanism in there, but you don't really know what it can do.
She is getting close to you now, dangerously close. She's spinning her weapons above her head now, a lot faster than before. You start slowly backing away while remaining ready to dodge her attack.
"
Lets fight."
"Then stop running. Come on. I want to see you. Let's get that mask off, see your FACE!"
At the same time her voice rises, she jumps forward and extends both her arms, putting the ends of her weapons on a collision course with your head. You are ready and jump backwards, dodging the attack, but she doesn't relent, immediately taking a step forward and trying to hit you again, spinning one of her weapons upward and another downward like two maces, going for your head again. You fail to react in time, so you can only watch the two points of light nearly collide with each other in front of you, two small flying blades framed in orangered and cyan passing millimetres away from your face. Lucky for you, her follow-up attack wasn't that accurate so you only end up with your clothes getting slightly scratched in your torso.
She is now standing a couple of meters away from you, the red knife embedded in the dirt in front of you while the cyan is spinning upwards defensively at her side.
"You can jump."
Her face is a bit more tense now, her grin has become a smile, her eyes have stopped looking into yours and are now going all over your body, analysing you.
"Or you're lucky."
Her breathing is slightly quicker, causing her already slow speech to sound slower. Her face has already begun becoming flushed from the effort.
"But can you hit?"
Pull away from it until the transformation is fully done, then suddenly rocket backwards, stabbing it with massive porcupine needles.
You try to use your two remaining legs to pull away, but the thing keeps pulling at you like a giant bubblegum and growing more of itself around your legs. You feel it going under you, reaching for your front legs, when your transformation finally completes. You make an evil grin (well, as much as a porcupine-like thing like you can grin anyway) as you use your two front legs to jump, flipping backwards and landing with all your spikes on the creature. It feels like it's boiling under you as it screams and vibrates. It becomes slippery again and lets go of you as it retreats away from you to reform itself.
It stands opposite to you, small holes on its thin skin bleeding something cyan that looks more like heavy air than something liquid, for it hovers a bit above the ground and dissipates after a while. The holes are closing.
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Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1148751 times)