"I think he's the wrong kind of special. Can't wait to go on a challenge with this guy."
Materialize a bottle of that drink. Roll it to the Gene as a peace offering.
You make a bottle of that warm brown booze in your hand.
"
Here! Peace booze. Peace booooooze! Peace booze gooooood!" you speak slowly and loudly, with exaggerated hand gestures and pointing, before rolling the bottle to the new guy.
Drink the drink, then throw it at his face.
You drink the booze. It's sweet and warm, not really how you'd expect booze to feel. But it has alcohol in it, you can taste it. You drink the whole thing in one go and it doesn't even make you light-headed.
After the drinking is done, you throw the bottle to the other guy. He seems too surprised to react as the bottle goes right for his head. The bottle impacts with great speed, shattering to many pieces. He stumbles backwards from the hit but doesn't fall.
"Hey! That's not nice! Be nice!" you hear the voice of a little boy coming from besides you.
"Why did you do that? He was just trying to be friendly!"
The crow stops cleaning its feathers and turns its head to look at you with one eye.
"Are you talking to me?"
It opens its wings and jumps from the branch it was sitting on, gliding its way towards you.
"What exactly do you want to know about? How we choose?"
"Yeah, you. How do you folks pick the next challenge?"
He glides until he reaches you and flies a small circle around your head.
"Oh, theoretically it's rather simple. We get all our avatars together, each makes a suggestion in order of seniority (if they have a suggestion to make), then talk and talk some more until we all decide what we want. Usually by vote, if we can't reach consensus."He lands on top of your hat, hitting you with a small gust of wind in the process. He's a bit heavy, but not uncomfortably so.
"There are some rules of course. There always are. For example, you can't propose a mission on a world belonging to one of us without the Owner's permission, if the Owner does not participate in the Games. That wouldn't really be fair, would it?"He bends his body to look at you with in the eye with one of its black eyes. It's kind of unnerving to have his beak so close to your eyes.
"The same curtsey is not offered to those poor poor Outsiders though." he adds with some mock sadness, flailing his wings about a bit in an exaggerated manner.
"And while we are deciding, we are... sort of locked out from the rest of the outside world. So that nobody tries to get smart, modify their world to make the challenge harder or easier. And after we choose, the world the challenge takes place becomes locked, for the same reason. Well, not fully locked, that would be terribly expensive and bad for some things in that world. But locked enough it makes it hard enough to get something through undetected without using the Players. And saying some things to the players is usually forbidden, so that doesn't happen often. Sometimes we may even be forced to remove some or all of the proceedings from memory to ensure that nobody gets knowledge they aren't supposed to. I'm saddened when that happens though, some of the arguing is pretty funny. And informative." He stops looking at you and emits a caw.
"Of course that doesn't prevent us from making 'behind the scenes' discussions, having some people decide what to vote or how to act beforehand."
"Once a suggestion for a Challenge is made, we discuss it a little bit. Try to find the one that works the best. Make suggestions to improve it. Work out what the reward should be. Decide if and how we're going to observe the challenge. We can voice objections. But all those are mostly meaningless. The one who proposes the Challenge is responsible for organizing it and has the final say for all aspects. With one exception. "He flies down to the fridge next to you and looks at you again.
"If a Challenge takes place in the world of someone other than the Issuer and we decide to do that challenge, then the Owner of that world can use his Veto. The Proposer and the Owner then must find a compormise. If that doesn't work, then the collective must reach a consensus about what the compromise should be. If that doesn't work, then we vote. And if THAT doesn't work then the challenge is removed from consideration and we are forced to choose another one. But I've never seen that last one happen yet. Then again, I haven't been in the Games from the start. Another might know.""Of course, like always, the rules aren't absolute. If we all agree beforehand, we can decide to ignore some of them. For example, in your previous mission, he gave you this thing" he hits your spear with his beak a couple of times, causing it to produce dull metal ringing sound
"thus breaking the 'World stays locked' rule. They thought it would be safer that way, not giving you the spears beforehand, in case you were captured.""But if one breaks the rules and we find out... well, it won't be very pleasant for the rule breaker."He caws a couple of times and bobs his head up and down.
<So, in short, imagine a bunch of children sitting in a locked room, trying to decide what game they'll have their dolls play, based on a loose set of rules that aren't always adhered to, depending on the whims of the collective.><You make it sound so misleadingly simple.><Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it isn't true.>
Into the air, eh?
((Start at around 3 minutes in))
This video contains content from BBTV_SonyPictures, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.
Sorry about that.
But I assume you meant
this.
Uhhh... Yet I do not understand what exactly you mean by that. So time for interpretation.
You point your hands behind you and summon an extra large couch. Its cloth cover acts like a parachute, slowing it down. Your feet touch it, bend and then you jump. You jump forward and downwards. Back to the field of battle.
But you're still falling and you're not yet close enough. So you summon more couches, shooting them in front of you. You jump from couch to couch like a frog hops from water lilly to water lily, making your way closer to your enemy with each leap. You are right above the target building now.
Bombardment with a small stream of washing machines serves as a battering ram with which to demolish the roof. A tiny fly swatter shall be the weapon with which to smite your enemy. And, finally, to break your fall, you summon a... nothing. You try again. Still nothing.
A thought akin to "oh crap" goes through your mind as you fall through the hole in the roof. Not an exclamation of fear or anger, merely a thought, two words reflexively appearing in the mind of someone who has been screwed over by the gods of luck time and time again. A thought you can see reflected in the face of your enemy a few milliseconds before you smash into him with terminal velocity. With both meanings of the word terminal.
...
You're not really sure what happened next, how the Staging Area chose to protect you. Even though there was no pain, there was a lot of white and black, many things touching you and much spinning around and general confusion. All you know is that what feels a few seconds later, you find yourself lying in a small Alan-shaped crater, looking at the sky as the building you were in collapses around you.
No, don't lose it yet!
>Calmly, with brevity, explain your situation. Explain that this is a life or death scenario and if you don't get help soon, someone may die. Don't tell them how you ended up in this situation, just that you're gravely wounded and need attention now.
"I'm bleeding! I am going to die if-""Like I said, can't help you, we're not a hospital.""I can't go to a hospital!""Listen man, we've got our own problems, we can't-" She pauses for a second.
"None of your business! Just stay there!" you hear her yelling, not talking to your host.
"There is a man there with you! He knows me! He made a delivery to me two months ago. Tell him it's the man from The Sunrise!"There is more silence and the sound of something being dragged against her microphone.
Irene...do something. Anything. Whoever we're fighting is armed with...something that the guards Boris were wielding.
I will...try my best to distract him.
Awena, I give you my strength. We must lure whoever is out there into the melee. Ignore the pain. Pain reminds you that you are alive. That you can still fight. Move up towards a doorway and synchronize with my sight. Throw a rock or make a noise to catch their attention.
I will not let you die.
Irene. Please respond. This takes no time. It is at the speed of thought.
Awena hesitates for a second. She gets up and tries to run away. She can feel the bullet fragments biting her flesh as she moves.
There is a flash of light and a loud bang coming from behind her. The noise echoes, like lightning has just struck.
She reaches a point that looks like a doorway (or what's left of one anyway) and hides behind it. As she reaches down to pick up a piece of rubble, you momentarily take control. Her pain becomes your own. Now you can feel the wounds as if they were on your flesh. You ignore the pain and instead focus on the throw.
You get out from behind the doorway, just enough to catch a glimpse of your attacker.
He has the overall shape of a human, but he looks more like some sort of demon. A head made of metal painted dull green. A face made of black plastic, with two large plastic cylinders for a mouth. Two human eyes hiding behind cracked glass. A body covered in singed dark green fabric, with burnt and bleeding flesh visible under it, in the places the fabric does not cover. White things like cracked marble showing through the holes in the fabric on his chest. Feet made of slightly melted plastic. A large black thing, similar to the weapons the guards were wielding but larger and more cylinder shaped hanging from his shoulder by a sling. And fire floating a few meters in front of him.
You throw the rock and get back into cover before you can see whether or not he took the bait. Half a second later you hear a metal ringing, like your rock just hit a metal pot. You ready your knife.
Irine
Zoe, please, please don't miss.
Be ready
Zoe
No Influence
Zoe hears a click, following by something metal falling to the ground. Before she can think about what that means, she sees a blur flying over her head and then there is only light and dizziness. Her ears hurt and she can only hear a ringing noise.
Nonono, this can't happen now!She tries to get better by sheer willpower. Unfortunately, the human body doesn't work like that. But there is nothing else she can do.
So she is left blindly crawling away from her position, trying to get some distance between her and her attacker. She needs more time to recover if she is going to face him.
Her sight is slowly returning.
Poll
15 (42.9%)
Author
Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1147593 times)