((Okay guise, this is officially the longest-ass update yet.))
Chester lets a small cloud of smoke out. It mixes with steam produced by breath and ascends higher and forward with the wind. Chesteк follows it with his sight.
What am I supposed to do now? I came here, my dream came true - a brave new world is at hand. I now withstand an alien. Maybe, first time in men's history. Maybe not. What am I going to do here? I was eager to work, to build, to explore. I got those in the very first day. Is this the end? Gonna say, back to Earth, old chap? Fuck no.
Chester looks around, as if the snow desert aound him was a picture of answer, or as if the moaning wind would whisper it. But the only thing he felt is frost biting his cheeks. This place holds no answer.
- To the Downbelow.
Chester steps forward, his face expressing resoluteness and confidence. Let's go there.
EDIT: Opened spoiler in my update. Suppressed sudden agression by watching some soviet multiplication on youtube.
McGaw follows Chester, her mind wandering.
"Why are you doing this?" She asks him. "Even if we're successful, we'll likely never be welcomed back to the colony. More likely shot on sight, with the reaction I just saw. Though we can probably help stop the attack, all the same. Maybe it's all for the better.
You have a whole life ahead of you. It seems...an awful waste. I'm not even fully human. It makes sense for me to do this."
Action: Follow Chester to my destiny, I guess.
((Also, I wouldn't call it rail-roading...I'm just wondering how it will be handled. I tend to wonder when the GM pulls out the mind control card 
))
Mitya half-falls, half-jumps off the wall, landing on all fours like a spider, then gets up, slouching slightly, and skulks - that's the appropriate word - in the direction of the building you left some time before. Chester and McGaw follow him, exchanging a meaningful glance.
He leads you through the corridor into the kitchen, then scuttles down the stairs into the trapdoor Chester opened before, the two of you dogging his steps.
Chester fumbles for a light-switch, but the power seems to be out - the Russians probably took their generator with them when they left, so he turns on his shoulder-lamp. The basement turns out to be a storage cellar, its earthen walls lined with shelves, now empty.
Mitya approaches one wall and taps it with his hand, then starts scratching it with his bare hands, tearing several nails off and making his hands look even worse. Chester winces, then shoves him away and [5] punches clean through the wall using hi exo-assisted strength.
There's a narrow tunnel beneath it, just barely wide enough for a human to walk through. Chester and McGaw walk after Mitya in a single file, ducking their heads low to avoid hitting their heads on the low ceiling. The tunnel is criss-crossed with smaller passages, wide enough to crawl through. Once, you walk past a niche in which several armored creatures with powerful digging arms sleep, curled up in a row. Another time, a small raptor-like beast scurries past you, carrying a dead rodent in its jaws.
You walk for half an hour or so; the extent of the tunnel network is truly terrifying, now that you think about it. Finally, the ceiling slopes up, and you emerge into a large cavern, clearly of natural origin. A small stream runs through it on the far end, falling down into a hole in the wall. On the shore of the stream, a huge, pulsing, monstrous pile of bodies grows like some horrible exotic mushroom. Most of them are animal, a massive collection of chitinous plates and twisting spines, toothy maws glistening with saliva. Some are human, their expressions oddly blank. All of it is bound together with a net of blood vessels and guts; it is clear that all the bodies share a circulatory and digestive system. Small bugs crawl in and out between the bodies, and one of the animals, an enormous reptile-like beast, appears to be chewing a piece of meat: probably the rodent you saw the raptor bring earlier.
"It's my...central processing unit?" -Mitya explains in response to your shocked stares.
"I mostly think with it, and my...movement-forms? Drivers? Ah...they are stored there. It's my main hive. You'll be linked to it, allowing you to use my forms and communicate mind-to-mind with me." One of the humans opens its arms, as if beckoning. McGaw steps forward, letting the arms envelop her. Chester watches as several strange tendrils wrap around her, one pricking her in the shoulder. She slumps, her eyes shut and her expression slightly troubled, a small frown on her forehead.
Chester swallows and follows her. Gotta go through with what is started.
[5] ((Oof. Thank teh gawds.))
Dark dreams plague you, visions of running in the forest as a huge beast, sweeping through the frozen skies on wings that are not yours, diving to sink your teeth into warm flesh on one hand, and visions of people's lives on the other. Your mother speaks to you in a language you have never heard before, and you understand. You are at once swaddled in a cradle, and swimming through deep dark water beneath millennia-old ice. You see with a thousand thousand eyes. The land is covered in you, and you scurry in a billion different directions at once, the snow crunching beneath the chitin of your feet. Knowledge of old, old time assaults your mind. You watch the course of rivers change. For a moment, your mind is touched by a bright spark, another. Mitya. Grief and joy, rushing toward death with wild abandon, finding solace for a second, then guttering out like a candle.
All the while, a foreign intelligence flips through your memories as you do with its own. Clean white rooms, a scoreboard, the feeling of joy. You have served. The cleanliness of a cloning tank and the white walls of a biolab, replaced in an instant with dirty tiled walls and a filthy blanket crawling with lice. DNA spiralling before your eyes, then the cold steel of a machine gun in your calloused palms. The distant plains of a place called Alaska, light-years away, now. Sterile corridors in a corporate building, and you walk side by side with a man in a dark suit. You depress the trigger, and a Chinese refugee collapses, riddled with bullets. You sign a paper, and then you are locked in a glass coffin, a calm voice counting in your ears - ten seconds to sleep. The scent of honey on the wind, the taste of eggnog, the sharp burn of vodka. Armenian cognac as you are discharged from the army. Memories mixing and mixing, until you are not sure where you are, where each of you is.
Time passes - it could have been seconds, could have been ages. Chester and McGaw are slumped on the floor, breathing slowly. McGaw opens her eyes and takes inventory of her mind carefully. She feels her body as if from a distance - if her mind was previously in it, now it's tethered to it with elastic thread, her body clearly distanced from her consciousness - now she understands how Mitya is able to walk barefoot in the snow. She pinches herself experimentally. It hurts, but it doesn't bother her - she's aware of the pain, but it's not
hers. She senses other bodies distantly, empty places filled with lower-order consciousnesses. Reaching out, she puts herself into one... and almost tumbles as strong winds buffet her wings, making her squawk in surprise and snapping her back to her body, away from the rolling panorama of the icebound ocean. She also feels the central hive - it's the only body she feels is truly
hers, the pain and hunger of which she feels as her own. She feels as if her awareness is on a rubber band from her body to the hive, and if the body were to be removed, she'd snap back into the hive.
Chester regains consciousness more slowly. The first thing he sees is McGaw, slumped on her side and staring off into space. Her eyes are deep amber. Thinking quickly, Chester comes to the same conclusions as McGaw, except that in his mind, he can also visualise the lay of the land around the fort outlined in small glowing dots - insect forms.
A voice sounds in your minds.
"That went better than I expected it to. I think I'm...sentient, now? Living a complete human life did me good. Improved my vocabulary tremendously, I might say. You two all right?"No, we're gonna need incendiary bombs for this; there's a mind-controller down there.
"Away we go then."
Right.
Head back to the colony.
Sean and Everett attach the bike to the hover with rope, putting the engine on neutral. After that's done, you hop in and speed off, the bike dangling after the jethover, whose engines are on the sides, so the bike is not in their trail. Soon, you are back in the camp. Everyone seems even more frantic; several more palisades have been erected, and another turret mounted on a high hill to the south of the camp.
Nobody seems to be paying you much mind, being to busy running around like decapitated chickens.
((All right, compared to Dwarmin and P's long-ass update, that seems kinda underwhelming. But their turn was an important moment.))
Take as many grenades as he allows, link them all up and attach a remote trigger. Fit them to the new drone then send it out towards the enemy convoy.
Matveenko seems to understand the urgency of the situation, handing you three AM nades, a crate of frag, and seven incendiaries. He also gives you a mining charge - if you mount it pointing down, most of the blast wave should travel downward, fucking shit up in its path. You link all of the boom to the drone, then let it fly, using the other drone's navigation beacon to point it. It soon joins it, both of them flying several hundred meters above the column, which is making its way toward your base rather slowly - they seem to be having problems with their platform. You could commence the boom any time now.
[6] Your other drone makes freakish speed, arriving at the enemy camp several hours sooner than you expected. There's a mining facility at the camp, and several long barracks. Their ship is twice as tall as yours, and half again as wide. Okay, so you can commence double boom as soon as you wish. Lucky you.
Estimated time until enemy contact - five hours.
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Topic: Trailblazers in a World of Winter - Chester crashes the party. (Read 58536 times)