Seeing things was never really my forte. What do I hear? What do I smell? Anything familiar?
This hole's porous and angular structure is especially good at absorbing sound, so using your normal brand of echolocation doesn't work that well. So you resort to shouting a random song down the well and using what little echo you get back to get a vague picture about the area down there. It's a gigantic empty room with a single exit going off towards the east.
You don't smell much. Well, you
do smell much, you smell the watchmen, the people that came to see them about... half an hour ago? some food, alcohol, squished stinking bug, something rotten, a rat... But there's not much of interest coming from down the well. Just ash and moisture mixed with a faint smell of fungal spores. Maybe you're just tired.
And then that movement you saw reappears and turns into a humanoid made of fire that turns into a small dog. Well, that was certainly easier to see.
If you want, we can expedite this, say you're smart enough to figure out who you are and how to communicate and skip to your more general plan. You know, something like "offer moral support and then leave Irine to find her own way out", "come up with some elaborate plan to construct an elevator our of palm trees and coconuts", "find enough birds to make a bird-jetpack", "have Alan dump stuff down the hole until he makes a climbable mountain of random stuff or manages to clog the hole", etc.
Yeah, I want to go full-fox. I'm still able to generate plenty of flame to shift back if needed, and there's no way I'm going to mess with that thing until I have more information. However, that food. Was it in here when I was in here earlier? wouldn't I have noticed it then? It's near the sword, did the thing make it? It has a human smell on it, I need to find where that human smell came from. I'm going to be shifting to full-fox anyway, and I am NOT going to waste food by eating it as big me. I need to be full-fox for eating because it'll be a much larger meal in that form.
order of actions: verbal comms check x3, shift full-fox, telepathic comms check, smell dem bones, gnaw on them and attempt to locate human smell source.
besides, I'm curious what changes have been made to my full-fox form, the one with the strongest fire magic. I mean, hybrid clearly was affected noticeably, I've got a good chance of being even more firey as full-fox, and might still look mostly normal as full-human, though I betcha I'm a blonde or redhead now instead of brown hair like I used to have.
You go fox and gnaw on bones. Changing feels a bit uncomfortable and with your weakness you fear you will pass out, but it feels like something is holding you, helping you hold on.
You don't get anything via telepathic comms. You can feel that your signal reached something in the sword, but if it understood your message, it isn't responding. Maybe it can't respond. Maybe it's broken somehow. Maybe it's just rude. Who knows?
Also, there's someone singing above. Looking up, you can see that now there's light at the end of the hole and you can see a shadow moving there, although you can't make it out clearly.
Your colour is quite similar to that orangeish D had when he used a fox form, with a few differences. You've gotten a lot fluffier on your tails, shoulders, elbows (which, if I'm reading this anatomical chart correctly, are actually called hocks) and especially the back of your head and neck. The fur has a tendency to become spiky and stand up, the one on your head and back of your neck being almost vertical, making you look like an artist's attempt to draw an animal with fire coming out of it that has come to life. In this light you can't properly see all the changes, but assuming you go out into the sun (or some other very bright light source) you'll see that on top of being super shiny, those parts are also iridescent, like tiny little prisms that display different colours of different brightness depending on how the light strikes them, with a preference for orange, red and yellow. And assuming someone with good eyesight took a proper and close look at your fur on these parts, they would see that it is not made out of hair but what looks like tiny shards. Still feels the same though, maybe just a bit rougher.
And now I'm imagining what it would be like if Irine was a stereotypical blonde.
I didn't actually think that through all that much, I just registered another possible way to unintentionally annoy the guy. I'd probably have proposed this to Ike and been 'nah'd.
...
Oh, I know something I could test out before I leave! Can I summon seeds? Would they, if I can, also be subject to the 'vanishes after a few whatevers' limit or would they potentially last long enough to grow up, produce more fruit and thus more seeds, and continue the cycle? Or no?
Well, you don't have powers over time, so you can't get to the second part of your plan, but we can say that you run the test long enough to see some of the seeds grow into small leafy plants. You could take one of your pots with you and continue your experiment. 6
Having a connection with dreams, or at least a vivid impression of lucidity within them, Theri wondered if she could project or visualize a concept for Irine or River. Any idea or sense of communication or connection--even the basest idea would do; but how to do so, even in pondering upon this uncertain act, was the biggest question to be answered.
She wondered if people had connections to physical objects and things too.
Try to focus on Irine; even a simple idea of contact with her would help in meditation.
You focus on Irine, creating a vivid image of her running up to you and then smiling to you. The image seems so vivid you feel as if you could reach out and touch her. You wish it was real, because you'd really like to hug her.
WMD, After the End
((Did my field not help too much against the Nanomachines? Or my armor?))
Go see if the magic slug is sentient and not hostile. See if it can help with my internal pain problem if it's friendly. Also see if the secondary objective became visible when I went boom. If the slug is hostile or not helpful, hightail it out of the crater and away from the direction of the alarms. Maybe grab one of those purple spikes on the way if I can break it off.
((Hmm... You do make a good point. I originally imagined the shield to be porous to allow allies to hide in it without suffocating. But that would leave it vulnerable to things like toxic clouds or flamethrowers. Maybe it makes more sense for it to create a negative pressure inside, push air out. Then again, that would make it very hard to breathe after a minute or two. You don't really need to breathe as much as a normal human when transformed, but you still need some air every once in a while, so assuming you need to stay transformed for more than a few minutes, you'd probably need to deactivate your shield every once in a while. And besides, the shield doesn't cover your entire body, just your core and the part of your body around it, unless you curl yourself up into a ball.
What would you prefer? Have air and other gases come through it (the way it currently is) or make it mostly airtight unless something pushes its way in?))
The snail does not appear to be interested in you in any way. It keeps carving its patterns on the crater walls, as oblivious to its surroundings as a writer trying to meet a deadline. From this close, you can see it's releasing a green substance to dissolve the ground and then absorbing that substance along with the dissolved ground. You could try standing in its path or touching it, but just talking to it and following it around doesn't do anything.
The purple spikes are vibrating slightly, occasionally discharging electrical sparks from their tips to the ground. You feel like touching them with your bare hands would be a bad idea. If you could find something like an insulated bag though, they could be useful.
The magical rain cloud keeps pouring rain without shrinking. The centre of the crater has already been covered by a sizeable puddle. You think that at this rate in about half an hour the entire crater will be filled and overflowing to the surrounding areas. Assuming its walls do not collapse from the pressure sooner.
You keep coughing blood for a while. Then you feel a bit better. Then you vomit blood. Then you feel a bit better.
Hmm... not good.
Can I see what the source of that is? Is it coming closer or threatening me? If yes, take cover. If no, try again on the sensor suite. You can never go wrong with a good sensor suite.
A thick spike gets pushed through the back of your neck and head, emerging out of the back of your armour like an antenna. You lose your normal sight and the ability to move your head but gain a top-down view of the surrounding area. You can focus on different parts of your view and apply filters like infrared and electromagnetic, but you can't change your perspective. This will make aiming hard (unless you go the top-down shooter route and use visible lasers or the strategy route and use autonomous units). It also makes looking at far away things a bit frustrating, since you have to keep moving your view for a while or repeatedly zoom way out (as much as you can in this underground space anyway) and then zoom back in. At least you xan easily and quickly recenter on yourself.
Using your newfound sight, you can see that something has exploded close to the edge of the city. Not the communication facility you were interested in, but one close to that section of the city. A quick look shows there's a large crater filled with strange glowing things. And a large rain cloud is slowly filling it.
Yep, going downstairs.
Okay. You reach the lobby, force open a door leading to a stairwell and start going down.
You reach the ground floor. The stairs keep going down but perhaps it might be easier finding your way above ground. You wouldn't want to get lost in the sewers or whatever is down there.
You take a peek through the door and into the ground floor lobby. It's very dark down here. There are sings of combat occurring here recently. Dead humans and grotesquely mutated rats and cockroaches with bioluminescent nodules on them lay on the ground, bleeding or burnt, twitching occasionally. There are scorch marks and bullet holes in the walls. There are a couple of workers in hazmat suits with flashlights attached on their shoulders that are slowly and carefully moving the bodies, putting them in body bags, labeling them and then stacking them in a corner. Maybe you could sneak past them. Or you could just alpha strike them before they have a chance to react.
Kosak Durar, After The End:
"Aha! I see what you're doing!"
Kosak attempts to figure out how many trunks are remaining(as in, unsevered). Afterwards, he severs the trunk he's currently on, and climbs onto the heart, then onto another trunk. As quickly as possible, wouldn't want to be grabbed by the goo stuff.
You are on the heart and it's moving its flesh around, trying to make you fall, but you've managed to hold on for now and make a small hole. The mechanofluid is forming a shell around the entire heart. The shell is rising out of the ground and closing its two halves, like a clam. The shell is not stopped by the trunks, the fluid it is composed of goes around the trunks, like one would expect from a fluid.
Now, what exactly is your plan? Destroy trunks and then climb them to reach more trunks to destroy?
Poll
15 (42.9%)
Author
Topic: Special People: Mechanical Syndrome (Read 1150981 times)