Survival
I'll just process some small actions to keep things moving.
@Alarith: Might also want to post an action, or at least inform me that you keep doing what you're doing so that I know to not wait for you.
((Things are bad if I'm the closest medic-analogue. It's only via sheer versatility, and I appear as likely to replace whatever is broken than to repair it.))
Haven't really had a chance to sense the car itself. Anything I could be improving? If so, go for it. You know, things I can safely do while it's in motion.
Car is fine. It was hit by a couple of bullets but they just knocked some scales off, nothing serious.
As for things you could be improving, it all depends on what you want to improve. As long as it doesn't involve the wheels, engine, or other parts necessary for the car's motion, you could do it. You could probably even replace some of those parts, but it would probably be quite harder to do so and not very safe.
So you could do something like add spoilers and generally modify aerodynamics to increase grip at high speeds, which seems to be one of the areas the vehicle is suffering.
You could start its conversion into a 007 car by fitting things like lasers, chainsaws, rocket boosters or
the ability to drive on two wheels.
Or you could start converting it into a tank. Increase armour, reinforce glass, add a turret with firing ports so that you can fire your weapons at enemies without exposing yourselves.
Or you could do something else.
Sweet, a new toy! Grab that guy a took the gun from, and use him as a shield. I doubt they came unarmed. Run back someway, ready my weapon for fire, and see what they do.
You grab the man in a chokehold before he can react, lift him up and start quickly backing off. The other three are surprised to say the least. After fumbling with their revolvers for a bit and backing off in fear, they stand their ground and point their weapons at you. The man in your grip is struggling and making chocking noises.
"Uh... Throw down your weapon and your, uh, man, uh, I mean our man or we will... uh..." one of them starts shouting.
"Kill you." the one next to him says.
"Kill you! Yes, we will kill you. That is what we will do. So let go of him. Please. Good sir."
The shouter receives an elbow to the side.
"I mean, not please! I command you! Or else. Else we will kill you. And we will do horrible things to you. Before we kill you. Not after."
Staging Area
"So, there are other people around here who... 'recruit' people like me? Anything you might be willing to tell me about them and the people they've recruited?
I'm guessing that it was the one who sounded dark and rumbly the one who is angry right now, not the one who sounded cold and emotionless, because, well, emotionless.
Yeah, dodging comes in handy when you're a mad scientist. Explosions, broken death laser gimbal mounts, maintenance trying to beat me to death with wrenches about every other day, the mayor throwing his desk at me after I tried to blackmail him with his steroid habits, so on and so forth."
The man laughs a bit and shakes his head.
"That sounds like fun world. I think I'll ask him if I can go visit sometime."He finishes his drink with a few quick gulps, fetches a new mug for you and starts refilling them.
"Anyway, my player is a cool guy with big ears that can kick ass, but he's probably not going to be around here for a while, if at all. Depends on how things go. I might need to start looking for a new one if he permadies."You hear the door opening. If you choose to turn around and look, you'll see someone entering. A humanoid with female characteristics made of soft grey semi-transparent plastic-like skin with chrome accents. Her eyes are solid blue and glowing slightly. The world outside (at least the parts of it that you can see) looks dark and rainy, with small puddles forming on the cobblestone-covered ground. Weather must change quickly around here.
"And this is a creation of another player. The one working for that emotionless guy you talked about. Yeah, that player can do all sorts of machines.
And create them too!" he adds with a laugh.
"Get it? Do machines?"The new arrival emits a
sarcastic clap from her speakers as she closes the door and starts approaching the counter, still a bit wet from the rain outside.
"Anyway, what are you doing here girl? Finally decided to accept my job offer? This place still needs a barmaid. It could be you..."She responds with a rather
negative sounding buzzer noise.
"Oh well. The offer still stands though."
"She'll cave eventually. Nobody can resist my irresistible charm and good looks forever." he leans closer and whispers to you.
"Anyway, how's it going out there?" he turns to speak to her again.
She rests her hands on the counter in a tired manner and makes multiple
error sounds.
"That bad, eh?"
Campaign
Campaign, Ike!
<Oh, so that is River? Or Darkstar or whatever? And you're talking to me through him?>
Try giving my main man a visual feed of things.
<I can honestly understand why he'd be a bit out of sorts. He did bleed half to death, got pissed at Irine and get hit in the head, and then got his ass nuked. And his girlfriend's presumably still dead, considering she's not here with me. Not really surprised he's alive, either, considering he is some kind of weird alien thing, and it would be the only sensible explanation of why I'm still alive, either. Wonder if he can resurrect the others, too, or if I just had an unusually resilient or fortuitously placed soul sphere?>
<By the way, what is River or Darkstar or that guy, anyway? Is he one person or some kind of composite thingy? What's his deal?>
Nod appreciatively at Mr. Beetle, then slowly move for the exit, keeping my ears, eyes and nose open. Check back to see if Mr. Beetle approves if he doesn't make any sudden moves to stop/murder me.
What does magical nuclear devastation smell like, I wonder?
You're not sure how exactly this sharing of information works, so you just wish really hard for it to happen. Whatever it is you did seems to be working, for you get a response soon enough.
<Oh, man, he looks even uglier than before. Yep, that's him allright. I can't believe how you thought that could be me. I'd never go for something like this. Not that he chose to look like this, but still.><And yes, I'm sort of in his head. The best analogy would be that if he is a giant robot, then I was locked in a cage somewhere in the control centre. Bloody idiot said it was for my 'own good' or something. Didn't even give me access to his Sight. He even put me on mute because my top notch advice and commentary were 'annoying' and 'distracting'!><Who's the idiot now, eh? You're the one that ended up as an ugly cockroach. Yeah, great job.><Anyway, after various ugly circumstances wrecked said command centre, I got free of my gag and locks. So I can sort of reach out through my cage and poke around blindly, try to work stuff and hope that the guards don't see, don't mind or have more serious things to deal with. That's how I get to talk with you. Good thing too, because as you can tell, I think he either can't hear a thing or can't understand a thing.>
<On the bright side, that means that you can make fun of him and he won't know. Isn't that right you big ugly bug?>You start slowly walking around, inspecting the room while searching for an exit. After watching you for a about a minute, the bugman goes back to standing near the fire.
<Oh, by the way, I think there's something wrong with your nose. Don't know why but it doesn't feel right. Maybe your soulsphere was damaged or maybe Bugface screwed up. You might want to have him to give you a check-up once he manages to regenerate fully.>Now that you have time to look at it more thouroughly, the room you're in looks like a wide corridor or an oblong room that has had parts of it covered or blocked off by rubble. In the furthest corner of the room, hidden around a collapsed wall, you can see what looks like a glass sphere, glowing slightly with a dim inner fire that slowly moves around like the ribbon of a rythmic gymnastics athlete. It has numerous cracks on its surface. The wall above it has numerous gashes.
<Yep, he's not very happy with her. For a while I was worried I was going to have to fight Cockroach man to keep him from killing her. And I'm really in no position to fight right now, unless you can fight someone with harsh language or killer jokes. I think he's hidden the others around here somewhere.>Searching around, you finally find the corpses he was talking about. Looks like a burnt man and a woman that has had her head crushed. Judging by her missing arm, it was probably your source of food. There's also some bones (many of them human) and some more clothes around here. I assume you grab some clothes so that you're not walking around barefoot and naked.
<As for what he is, he is two beings. Or, more clearly, two bodies. You see, most entities, we have our avatars, we have our universes, backups, all sorts of crap and we're really 'spread out'. Which is kind of fun, because you can do many things at once and never care about dying, just got to synchronize everything every once in a while to ensure there's not too much drift. There are some rules regarding those things, but as long as nobody learns about it, there's little limit to what you can do.>
<But he is not an entity. I mean, he technically is an entity, he is part of the agreement and he is listed as one in the Library, but he doesn't have all those things. No universes of his own, no backups, no nothing, just two bodies. From what I understand they share memories whenever they meet but they are not connected in any other way. Well, except for their bond to their master, there's almost no way to sever that.>
<For a time he just stuck with his original bond-former body, but for some reason one day he decided he wanted a new one. So he got that thing. Probably got someone to make it for him, since he sucks at things like that. I think he may have wanted to take a vacation or something, because he asked me to travel with him some time after that. But things got a bit out of control and we ended up almost killing each other, so I'd say that worked out pretty well.>After a while, you find the exit. It's actually quite close to where you woke up, near the fire, you just didn't thought of looking up to find it. In retrospect, using sonar to scan the room might have been faster. You climb through the hole and crawl through the narrow space that follows. For a few seconds you feel a bit sick and the sound of your entity's voice cuts off but everything is back to normal by the time you reach the other side.
<Oh, there you are. Stopped transmitting for a sec. I don't know what those things do, but I don't like it when he gets near them. Probably why he put them there.>On the other side is the skeleton of a building, a building that was probably built by some flammable material, leaving only ashes and collapsed support columns around. The fact that it is surrounded by collapsed or damaged stone buildings makes it look like a crater. Good for hiding, not so good for observation. You start climbing up a mound of rubble to get a better view.
The smells are much the same as when you arrived, although the smell of fire is much stronger now. The sky is still covered in smoke that makes its colours appear 'warmer' more red. When you reach the top, it becomes apparent why.
It appeared, when you first arrived, that the city was built on the side of a hill or mountain, with the tower being closest to it. Now however, it becomes apparent that it was a volcano. An active one. There's something very strange going on with it, for it appears there is a literal river of lava coming out of it, flowing down its side, around one of the city's walls and disappearing somewhere beyond the horizon. Probably magical.
The explosion has caused extensive damage to one of the volcano's sides, causing it to 'bleed' lava that flows downwards into the crater where you assume the tower once stood or into parts of the city. You'd guess the tower extended underground. Around ground zero there's nothing left standing. The ground was probably unstable or filled with vents; it has crumbled and collapsed, causing the destruction of almost all buildings around it. As if it wasn't enough, many buildings have been hit by large pieces of rubble.
It looks like you're somewhere close to the outskirts of the city, where the ground becomes more flat. You can see the walls and some buildings that look almost intact further down. The walls especially seem to be the thing that was least effected, with only very small sections of them having collapsed. You can see signs of people outside the city. Most of the buildings out there were made of flammable materials and didn't survive, but there are tents or temporary hovels. You can see another group of makeshift habitats much further away.
Everything is quiet, save for the wind.
<Oh boy, you really did a number on this place, didn't you? What's this, second city you destroyed?>
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Author
Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1140990 times)