Make a complete list of necessary supplies and estimate a cost.
Well, you'd need steel. A lot of it. And definitely a sizable quantity of gold - not adulterated gold, mind you. Pure gold. You realize that the machine would need to be much larger if pure gold wasn't used, even if you substituted something like silver. You'd also need quite a lot of tools for all the cutting, bolting, welding and lifting required - a construction crane would be indispensable. You tabulate all the costs with Fermi estimates, and then take a look at what you've got.
So! If you skimp on a sizable portion of the costs, and maybe steal a construction crane and the necessary tools, and do all the work yourself without any hired laborers, plunder the gold you need and refine it yourself, you're looking at costs somewhere in the upper limits of six figures and a building time of five or more years, plus a large amount of danger involved. And if you do everything legally and hire laborers, you could shorten the time significantly - but then you've got expenses in the eight figure range, you're guessing. A pound of gold costs around two grand, and you would need
several metric tons for the mirrors. And without the gold, the machine would need to be twice as large, which may be even worse in terms of labor costs.
"Ow. Damn it, that hurts." Jason muttered at the pain of his shoulder and nose spitting out his tooth and sitting on the ground. His mother was a bit too injured at the moment to comment on his profanity, so he reached into his pocket to get his phone. Dialing 911, he lifted it up to his ear.
"Nine one one, what is your emergency?"
"Yeah, I need to report a parahuman attack. It happened at 1192 Winchester Street, there are three injured. We made it out, and we're at the corner of Winchester and Stanton. It was that weather control girl. There was acid rain and fire and fumes. Please send ambulances." Jake responded into the phone, taking a moment to cough halfway through due to the burning sensation in his lungs.
"Okay sir, remain calm. Ambulances are on their way."
Jake hung up the phone, putting it back in his pocket before coughing a bit more and reaching over to check on his mother and brother. Now that he wasn't in imminent danger, he was feeling a bit tired. Odd, since it was hard to find the words to explain the mild exhaustion he felt. One thing he knew for certain, though. That parahuman bitch was going to pay for doing this to his family.
It takes only a little bit of time for ambulances to arrive, complete with rescue crews wearing what seem to be special hazmat suits. And even they seem leery of entering the storm. You look over at a small group of them standing at the edge of the affected area, seemingly working up the courage to go into hell itself.
"I don't think it's ever been this bad before," one says
"No shit. It's like judgement day in there."
"Wish I could have one last smoke before we go."
You don't really hear all of their conversation, because a paramedic guides you over to the ambulance - on the way you get a glance at your mother, slightly burned, her hair singed and emitting a foul odor. She appears generally okay, however - Nick is right there with her, currently crying his eyes out. All three of you are taken to the hospital in different ambulances, and on the way your clothing is taken away and put into a separate bag. As soon as you get to the hospital, you are very thoroughly washed from head to toe. A few - and only a very few, one or two of your neighbors two houses away, seem to also have escaped the disaster so far. They look far more injured than either you or your family, as you can plainly observe in the ward you now share. Doctors arrive routinely, providing you with various medications for your ailments.
Eventually, your father arrives, walking into the ward to visit the remains of his suburban life briskly.
It was going to come out anyway. Carrie supposed that now was as good a time as any to talk. The man that she desperately wanted to go to and kick in the head was being arrested, her mother was dead and her memory shattered. "Um... miss, my mother," she couldn't even bring herself to call her "Mom" anymore, "She's over there on the ground. Can I go see her?
I guess I'm not going home soon, huh?"
The officer seems a little torn on what to do, taking a few seconds to say anything or come to a decision. And the decision is less than pleasing.
"I'm... going to have to ask you to get down on your stomach. Hands behind your back, please."
Selina could only give the barest of nods, her body shaking as if crying, but she still could not cry. The dream had only made it worse, giving her a tiny solace before bringing her back to this grime torture.
The man didn't even seem to care how she thought of this, cutting into her with no other reason than to see if his precious injections could heal her body no matter what he did.
((Note: If he does bring her food, halfway through she tries to bite his hand.))
"Okay, food it is!"
The man walks off, running off upstairs, and returns about fifteen minutes later with a sandwich in his bloodied hand, which he then brings close to your mouth. You take one bite of the thing - it's actually quite good, you notice as you digest it, buttered rye with ham and parmesan, with some greens added into the mix, plus some kind of sauce added in. Your hunger, subdued so far by your immense suffering, kicks into high gear, and you start to eat a little faster, the sandwich quickly disappearing as you munch on it, the man nodding enthusiastically.
"Good stuff, huh? I tell you, my wife makes-"
He is interrupted by you sinking your teeth right into his hand, tearing into flesh as you clench your jaw as hard as you can, then pull your head away as rapidly as you can, a sizable chunk of skin and muscle getting torn out of the the guy's hand. He screams in pain, clutching his hand and losing his grip on the thing, and for the first time in days you feel genuine pleasure, the realization and nature of which frightens you a little.
"Gah! Fuck!" he shouts as he looks at his bleeding hand. "What are you, rabid or something? That's it! You only get soup from now on!"
He runs over to the case, takes the very same syringe he injected you with, filling it with a bit of the concoction he's got, then using it on his own hand.
"Now, let's see... ooh, that stings pretty hard," he says as the tissues of his hand reform. "Is it supposed to hurt this badly when it works?" he asks, seemingly of you. Reflexively, you shake your head vigorously, spitting out the piece of his hand you were idly chewing on up to this point as you realize you've been doing so. "Oh, shit. Did I do something wrong? Fuck!" he says, gazing nervously at his hand, then at you. "Come on, work right, work right! Oh, hey! Pain's receding!" he concludes with visible relief. "Sweet! I guess it is working!" the man flexes his hand, finding it to work nicely. Slowly getting up, he turns to you.
"Now, no biting from here on in, or I'll test if you can regenerate a lost head, got it? And I did mean it! Only soup from here on in! Good night!" he says sternly, though it seems sternness does not come very naturally to him from the way he says it, turns off the light, then walks out of the room, locking the door behind himself.
Hours pass in the darkness. The first time this happened, you were still very much in complete shock, unable to think to any degree. And today, while no less traumatic, was more... numbing, so to speak. You really don't have any tears left by this point, not that they help. And your mind, left to ponder in this time of respite, is kept awake with a great many thoughts, brought into sharp focus by today's act of resistance, a residual feeling of power suddenly regained staying with you throughout the period. Your mind now goes in many directions, one thought pattern flowing into the next. Escape. Survival. The desperate need to hurt the man who put you through all this. Each element of your wishes requires the other, and you, driven by your desperate need, begin to thrash on the table you've been strapped to. You have no chance of getting free, and this you dimly realize, but you try to fight the restraints anyway, with no luck at all, until your resistance tapers off along with your consciousness, and you dream of a wonderful dog you once knew in your childhood, and about which you are unsure if it's still alive.
"Hey, wake up!"
You awaken, regarding the man, who seems to have returned. You regard him with a little less fear than before, though he is certainly more than capable of hurting you very, very badly. Perhaps you just don't care as much as you used to. Looking around the room, you notice an important difference - the covered basement window seems to be partially open now, a garden hose running in through it. The man appears to be holding it currently.
"So, uh, no offense, but you smell kind of awful, and there's a lot of dried blood, so I figured I'd wash you or something. Just a warning, the water's pretty cold."
He turns on the hose, and the water is indeed pretty cold.
"Oh...okay. Thanks for your, uh, help."
I left, then. She went her way and I went mine. I thought about trying to find some more people to question, but...it didn't sound like it would help any. But...well, we should at least inform the police, right? Better safe than sorry...I swallowed as I started my car, pulling out onto the street as I headed home. Mom would understand. She would know what had happened with them.
Right?
You return home. Your mother's not there yet, of course - she's got work today, hence why you were the one to pick up the kids rather than she. Your sister has a similar arrangement on Thursdays. And as soon as you walk into the apartment, you hear the landline phone ringing wildly. You're not exactly sure why somebody's calling you on that, and immediately pick up.
"Yes? Hello?"The voice on the other end feels vaguely familiar, though you're not sure from where exactly. It seems to be a woman with a shaky tone to her voice.
"Oh, uh... hi, who is this?"
You identify yourself.
"Ah! Yeah! Serra, baby, it's your aunt Meche," the voice replies, and you are instantly struck by recognition even as she blithers on with her pleasantries, asking how you're doing, how she didn't even recognize your voice, that you sound like a grown woman and so on. Aunt Meche, or Mercedes, isn't exactly your aunt, relation-wise. She's your mother's cousin. The bad kind of cousin, the kind best avoided, though this is all you really know about her from what your mother's told of her and what you once saw of her at a family reunion of sorts. She looked pretty awful there, and from her voice you would guess she looks pretty awful now.
"So, uh, how are Dominic and Lucian?" she asks, getting your attention with the way she says it, which is very unsurely.
Fueled by the sudden influx of exhilaration and invigoration brought about by whatever the hell just happened Steven stares at his hands for a moment then snaps his gaze up at the men who buried him and lets loose a joyous roar as he launches himself forward as fast as he can towards the nearest skinhead and delivers a crushing uppercut to the mans face.
((This is an attempt to see if i can use my power as a source of propulsion by the way.))
Almost oblivious to your own still very much existing injuries from the flood of endorphins, you climb out of the pit, and look around for skinheads. You don't actually see any until you look upward, seeing one blasted up into the sky by the explosion, only now reaching the apex of his fall. He might already be dead. You don't really care. An instinctive sense guides you as you concentrate downward, creating a single blast of kinetic force that propels you straight upward toward the target, laughing as you speed toward your quarry, who seems to be still vaguely conscious as he flaps his visibly broken limbs and screams as you near him.
Bringing your fist forward in exactly the sort of flying uppercut you fantasized about while you were a small child, that same instinctive sense causes you to focus more of your power as you begin to slow down, and as your fist is on the course to narrowly missing the skinhead's face, since guiding yourself in freefall is more difficult than surmised, you release it - the skinhead, needless to say, is blasted away, his ribcage effortlessly crushed by the kinetic shockwave, while you, in some strange pinball-like manner, fly downward at roughly the same speed as you were just ascending.
As the ground comes nearer within seconds, panic overtakes you for a second, and the instinct flares up a third time, and a blast is emitted from your body in all directions, with a priority on the downward one, slowing your descent to a mere ten or so meters per second. As you scramble to prevent your own death just as things were getting so promising, the blasts become more frequent, about three a second or so, each one decreasingly intensely pointed downward, until you finally touch down like a feather in the crater below, observing as the spinning body of the dead skinhead impacts hard into the ground just two or so meters away in the new crater you've made with your descent.
You notice the sirens have returned, coming closer now, and doing so very quickly. Around you the construction yard is in a shambles, the truck overturned, a terribly injured skinhead crawling out of it very slowly, not perceiving the world around him very well. There's no sign of the third guy anywhere. Maybe he was pulverized in the blast or something, though you don't see any blood aside from the guy who wanted to bury you and who you made very dead personally.
(Not really sure what to do here. Just say I'm doing nothing?)
You can continue to submit to authority, yes. You were merely being given a chance to do something else with the new information you have received if you so wished. Or maybe say something menacing, or make a last ditch escape attempt. Or maybe just RP out some of your feelings. But you can just go on ahead without doing anything in particular, yes.
Author
Topic: Worm: Edwardstown (Read 135626 times)