Event roll: 9
Not many notice, but the wind picks up at worrying speed to the point of being able to shove barely-mobile castles around!
Kolima, having sent people out to push the place away from what is looking like a fight they're sitting in the middle of, is certainly helped along by the building winds!
Whoosh! It is currently midafternoon.
As things continue to appear around
Castle Zipworld, the things that had already showed up are looked through for interest, while a feast of chicken is prepared with half the chickens. Among the junk is found a golf club, a Large Crayon (the size of a golf club), an orange (the size of a grapefruit), and a device that appears to have been built in a way that every side (including the inside) is visible to the outside at any angle. It gives a few inhabitants a headache when they realize this, but it is kept anyway. The will of the warp is not sufficient enough (in this instance) to keep the castle from being moved by the winds however, and Castle Zipworld eventually ends up in B1 as a result.
The Omnipotent Overmind of the
Fluxxstone is not afraid of any sort of duck, but this chaos duck is a nuisance. As such, a couple Chicken Warriors are flung toward it, and while they manage to fly for a very short time and attack it, they eventually fall back down, but it was long enough for the Cluckulator to have found the best angle to attack from, and after mentioning it is flung in that direction! The Cluckulator flies towards one of the Orbiting Fluxx, rebounds off it headfirst, and lands Axeplicationer-first on the Enraged Chaos Duck, multiplying it into 4 Chaos Duck Chunks! The Cluckulator did not gain any better flight however, and just as quickly as the others crashes back into Fluxxstone, rather dazed from the impact with the castle but having successfully won a battle with its new weapon. The winds blow forcefully against Fluxxstone in the meantime, but not
quite enough to make the sky castle move an entire sector.
+4 Raw FluxxDr. Coggington manages to land on the small island near P3, but not without losing some of the navy chickens on the way down to physics throwing them to their doom on landing (or more specifically,
falling without castle damage after having to take the increased winds into account partway down) upon the island. At first glance it appears to have ruins, a longer look shows that they are mostly rubble. But still, theres probably at least
some archeology potential here, and if not, at least the cloud is still nearby, and theres small amounts of radioactives somewhere in the ground of the island.
+1 steamUpon
Heaven's Acropolis, teams are organized to scout out the island and report back, as confused reports of chicken on duck air combat are received from the people looking in Fluxxstone's general direction and anchoring processes are underway. It is a rather large island, and will take some time to scout out completely. In the mean time, Engineering believes it has the correct parts made to bring the Stormbringer alive again. They are given the go ahead to install them while the chickens are cloned and lunch is made. During the cloning, its found out that these
are terran domestic chickens, just with highly-mutated feather color and skin color genes. The cloned chickens are born just as blue as the parents.
New parts installed, the Stormbringer is activated at the highest settings, only to fizzle out and produce a message on its readout:
Insufficient wind generator installed for current setting. Replace properly.
Currently within a cloudbank. Signal does not travel well within clouds, only to clouds.
Stormtalk database not yet initialized. Ensure you are connected to the Exonet before trying again, or add database manually from local storage (C:\).
Insufficient power stored to call tornado. Plug into to charging base or check for errors in battery.
Krarkkus rumbles as it nears the island, which eventually results in two things: A triad of diplomats sent to Laputa, and the strange avians are assimilated. However, about a third of the birds explode into a mess of bits of bird and toxic gas when they are brought within the sky kraken and out of the sky. This does not appear to kill anything, but brings a roar out of Krarkkus. The island, once some of the inhabitants have left to explore it, appears to have several large, empty, ruined buildings in it, hexagonal in shape. They're in rather good shape, considering their ruined look: they aren't so much crumbling as they are just leaning against each other.
Laputa, as it receives a few diplomats but probably less than they expected, send a team down to consider titanium mining. While the report it sends back is very
unsure about how one mines a sky island without knowing when you are about to fall down to your doom, geologically speaking it should be doable, the island is stable and not likely to fall apart in the process. Meanwhile, the arc blazer is dissasembled and analyzed. Lacking the exact materials used in its construction and circuitry, the laputae improvise.
The first attempt at replicating it blows up in a burst of lightning in the hand of the tester and kills him, but after analyzing what is missing from the test device remains it looks like the materials used just evaporated under the heat. The second attempt uses more heatsinks in the circuits and materials with higher heat resistance, and just shorts out with a click and the sound of melting heatsinks instead of exploding.
Progress!The
Devastator Airship is not afraid of enraged, crazed ducks, not even ones with blades for feathers. So they ignore it and clean up the mess it left as it continues to fly mad circles around the airship, aflame but not burning, and sometimes it rams the ship again. Its still quite clearly interested in destroying the ship, but in more of a stalemate manner; each time it attempts to claim the deck, it is grabbed solidly (but not tackled) and hurled off the ship again posthaste. The poison gas launchers are fired again (this time with properly lasting gas), while the torpedoes are prepared as they move east to L17. Once they reach that sector of airspace, the torpedoes are
fired directly north, but end up missing Castle Arrip by a noticeable margin.
Castle Arrip vs
Hand of God, round 1.
An Eiral bursts into the council room as the declaration is made.
"Sirs! Torpedoes from the south nearly hit us!"
Open fire on the Hand of God anyway. We must deal with their nearby offense to avians before sorting out this new front.And so they did! The Hand of God also open fired back at nearly the same time while charging towards Castle Arrip in an attempt to ram, and the resulting mess of water magics, divine lasers, toxins and skirmishers results in the first major attack since sky castles begun being constructed on Alzeran. There is also some continued research on arrows for the LBotA and some production on the boomeranging ones, but no real successes in new arrow types yet.
+0 metal, +2 Pop from BMsRamming Speed!---Hits---
Magic Water Cannons x5: 3+3 (6) vs Hallowed Choir: 7+15 (22), miss.
Magic Water Cannon Alpha: 19+6 (25) vs Hallowed Choir: 5+15 (20),
Hit!Skirmisher Hangars x2: 2+13 (15) vs Rope Structure #1: 6+16 (22), miss. 2 Population used.
Toxin Spitters: 13+20 (33) vs Rope Structure #2: 2+6 (8 ),
Hit!Angel Fire Cannons x2: 18+15 (33) vs Rope Structure #1: 20+16 (36), miss.
---Speed---
Magic Water Cannon Alpha: 19+4 (23) vs Toxin Spitters: 18+20 (38), Toxin Spitters hit first.
---Crit---
Magic Water Cannon Alpha: 5, no crit. (almost though!)
Toxin Spitters: 1, no crit.
---Damage---
Toxin Spitters: 9-1 shield = 8 damage, minus 1/3rd from Rope Structure #2 = 7 damage to Rope Structure #2.
Magic Water Cannon Alpha: 15-1 shield (cloud)= 14 damage, minus half from Hallowed Choir = 7 damage to Hallowed Choir.
Honestly, I can't say I was ever expecting equal damage on the first fight. What the crap, dice.
The Hand of God fails to hit the swaying and wobbling rope fort that is Castle Arrip, and quickly reverses so as not to make itself an overwhelmingly easy target to hit. In the crossfire between the water bolts and skirmishers and toxins that fills the air the Hand leaves open, eventually the Toxin Spitters of the Hand of God claim the
first real blow, burning through the faint shielding, snapping ropes, and quickly weakening others as the chemicals tear up as much as possible before the being swept away by the fierce wind. In response, Magic Water Cannon Alpha aims carefully and scores a
mighty blow on the Hallowed Choir, most of which is swept away with the impact of the massive water bolt!
The movement directions layer is under the sky castle one. So I made a bit of a wiggly line to still show that Hand of God is charging at Castle Arrip.
Krarkkus: #555555, a gray
Laputa: Purple
Castle Arrip: Cyan
Castle Zipworld: #7F0000, dark red
Dr. Coggington: Purple, yellow trim
The Fluxxstone: #0f6e63, greenish
The Hand of God: #81CE5B, light green
Heaven's Acropolis: #FFCC00, yellow
The Devastator Airship: Red
Kolima: #40824C, earthy green
The gas cloud will last 3 turns.