I'll take option #2
A pale blur. An explosion. The blast grazing, but enough to spell doom. Damage indicators flare across your screen as the view spirals into glossy pavement and goes black. In crimson letters,
SIGNAL LOSS burns across your vision.
You recline in your seat, it's comfortable, but not too comfortable, and one of the only parts of the cockpit that cannot be swapped out - apparently they were worried pilots would just stuff into a miniature couch and fall asleep or something. That, and concerns that tampering with the stim-injector currently pressed gently against your thigh, would result in a rather nasty case of air-embolism.
You look over your screen, augmenting your view is is a window cycling through the remaining Units 01 and 04 along with your own camera feeds to the upper left, to the lower left is your squad map, now noticeably mission the Unit 02 icon, over on the right side is the frame status and blow it, the ECM data window. By the looks of it, the core's reactive armor's back at 100%, and whatever minor scratches were dealt to the left arm, are precisely that. It was, fortunate, in some respect that you were hit in the core, the reactive armor doesn't extend too far into to the limbs.
They tried to, boy did they try, but the system simply doesn't like moving parts that much. See, located in your frame is a scavenged Dead Hand artifacts, that, when rigged and doctored together with a few additions the engineers cooked up, produces a steady stream of molasses that is then pumped through channels in the armor. Now, if something, were to strike this with enough force, then molasses violently sprays forth in seemingly larger quantities than there should be, dampening the impact. It's pretty lethal against infantry, and while it doesn't pack enough punch to menace frames that much, it's hell to remove, especially if it catches them in the cameras.
The trick of course, is to make sure that the frame's own movements don't set it off, and that it still gets pumped back into place quickly enough, which ironically enough, due to the near unavoidable leakages, often makes the system itself pretty irritating to maintain, which is compounded by the fact that while it does recharge, the plating the channels are carved into will be degraded and damaged with each impact, meaning that it becomes less effective over time. The fact that the source is located in the rear, and therefore takes more time to resupply frontal plates, doesn't make it any better.
Still, magical armor's magical armor, Unit 02 didn't have that, expendable autos usually don't have much, and right now, you're probably cursing the poor camera and comms quality. Skipping back through the occasionally pixellated and jumpy footage, you scour for clues on the nature of your assailants and their attacks, something to justify sacrificing this pawn.
You find it shortly after impact, as the autoframe was toppling out of the air, a few nice frames that manage to capture another missile and its launcher. Well, it's, probably, a missile at least. It looks close enough to one, or at least like it had a few in its family tree. Still, you're not entirely sure
what it's supposed to be, it looks like someone tacked oversized avian wings to the bastard lovechild of a horse and cruise missile. At any rate, just based on the appearance and explosion radius, it's designed to take out something decidedly larger and slower than a frame, especially not a PUPPET.
In the corner of the frames, you can just make out what fired it. It's just shorter than your frame, though far slimmer, proportioned more like a person or a pillar, its form smoothly flowing down and outwards as if clad in a formal dress. It seems to glide across the ground and any real limbs, with sleeve like protrusions sliding down, fused to the "dress". The head is humanoid, with a featureless mask-like face and writhing tendrils extending from the head. It seems that its entire head has rotated backwards, another missiles emerging from the much narrower "neck" amidst a flash of sanguine light. Judging by 02's recorded maneuvers, there were several of them.
It appears, that you are fighting a small squad of pez dispensers. Overgrown, armored pez dispensers that, rather than dispensing sweets, dispense homicidal horse missiles.
You'd probably be thinking this is all rather strange if you haven't just spent the last five minutes trying to avert your eyes from the comrade who called you up for this gig enthusiastically rubbing himself against a large, blue-tinted metal box in a way that makes you feel rather uncomfortable while the hallucinatory lady who gave you magical powers texted an explanation of how it's the physical manifestation of a Fall-corrupted janitorial AI directly to your brain.
Okay, let's take a step back and summarize the situation shall we? Clear our thoughts a bit?
- You were contacted by a comrade to transport the large mysterious box of unknown purpose. You took four transport PUPPET autoframes with you, as your LANDSKNECHT's reactive armor renders it incapable of transporting infantry, not without the risk of sugary friendly-fire at any rate.
- You found a terminal in your frame, and activating it, hallucinated a figure who calls herself MALEBRANCHE. She gave you magic.
- En route, you came under attack from missile strikes. You lost Unit 03.
- MALEBRANCHE identified the box, and seemingly repaired it. Apparently, scrubbing it against something, or scrubbing against it causes it to erase "rubbish" from reality. Turns out it classifies certain explosions and shrapnel as rubbish.
- You sent Unit 02 out on a suicide mission to scout out the culprits.
So, what are you fighting? Well, they're certainly not fellow System League units, they're too weird to be NEE, not the same kind of weird shit as the weirder Vestige stuff, and too big to be Loremaster or Dead Hand. So that rules out... literally everyone unless-
targets id'd as from a pre-fall unit on flr2
must've drifted here
Well, that doesn't bode too well.
Right now, you'll need at least one of the PUPPETs to transport the soldier, and it's probably best that it, or the other carry the box. You fight better than them anyway seeing as your frame's head uni has absurdly good cameras capable of seeing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in addition to pin-pointing electronics and living organisms through walls from great distances, whilst your ECM can disrupt all other electronics in a vaguely directed area for brief moments, which you can only presume would be effective against missiles. Well, it
can go indefinitely, but it causes everything to go kooky and
wrong, or so you've been told.
Your FCS is, well, it can lock onto and track a limitless number of targets without any noticeable performance loss, targets that can be as small as people or as fast as missiles, but it also occasionally prioritizes allies or pieces of furniture located beyond your visual range, so it's a bit of a mixed bag, still better overall than most.
There's just one slight problem, your weapon, is shit. The 19-MUSKETEER/SR is
like a sniper rifle, but without the sniping, and it traded all its ammo capacity for being able to function as an oversized shiv. There's a reason why it's almost exclusively used by expendable autoframes after all. So yeah, the fact that this is your primary and only armament basically means you'll have to shoot a frame, shank them with your rifle, and pray that they were carrying a better weapon. Lovely.
Your frame and the other two remaining autos are currently inside the warehouse the AI box was found in.
((The LANDSKNECHT frames aren't all this powerful we swear! It's just that whenever Corsair rolls for one, the dice skip over all the weak and shitty combinations and instead decide to hand out animu deathmachines like it's Oprah or something.))
"Yeah... "
Does this ejection seat have anything for communications? I may want to tell my latest boss I'm gonna be late.
Look for pens or other writing implements.
Science: 70 90
The ejector seat indeed comes with a radio set, and now that it's no longer part of the frame, the mechanical interlocks should be disengaged, allowing the former pilot to take it with them if need-be. You find a selection of ballpoint pens in one of those mesh pen cups.
[COMP: 10/4] Spell
[COMP: 16/4] Synchronization
A metal cowry, the size of a basketball, manifests before you. Its shell is formed of solid silver, with swaing protrusions closer to tendrils of native silver than actual papillae. The body is semi-molten despite being at room temperature, or at least close enough to it that the carpet isn't burning or anything. It slowly glides around you, apparently tame.
"Hello there mates! I'm just an aerogel torso mechanic hero guy. Care to tell me if you have any beef with me? Maybe why you're here?"
If hostilities are initiated, James throws himself straight up in the air by striking the ground with one of his hands, hopefully dodging any attacks. While in the air, he then conjures his bound axe and tosses it at Stave Guy's head. If hostilities are not initiated... conversation, methinks.
"To investigate this facility and capture the unknown units responsible. You must be the, contact, they spoke of."Same cold drawl, just a lot less intimidating give the slight stutter.
"Can you still fight?"
Author
Topic: Perplexicon - Down the Foxhole - Raining Mecha (Read 180244 times)