Get Jus to tell us how close we are to the target. If he doesn't know or the results are vague, use Equipment Check directed above us to try and pinpoint the anomaly artifact. On the off chance it is only a floor or two above us, use a Plasma blast on the ceiling to burn through to the floor(s), then haul ass upwards with the Ladlemonger. Otherwise, let Ladlemonger attack the birds first. If it weakens them enough to provide openings, blast then with my Bound weapon and Alcyone. If they aren't too damaged, then blast them with plasma. Regardless of the results, haul ass along the safe path with Ladlemonger, dodging when necessary, but not into the spiders.
Yes jumping into lightning spiders is bad. You shouldn't do that. You end up having to use Equipment Check to pin-point it.
Two floors above you is an armored "generator". It is powering this entire storm and everything in it, save for that dragon.
It's cheating. It has "gaps" in it, and instead of proper components, it has twisted space filled with some kind of "it just works" magic.
Its output is only at 20% of its maximum, and require further infrastructure to raise it. And by infrastructure, I mean bodies. Its security units are going to try and kill you, harvest your body, and use it to get a better foothold.
It will most likely succeed.
I am detecting a semi-autonomous security unit in the chamber with it. It isn't quite a piece of hardware so I can't fully analyze it, but what I'm picking up says a lot.
It is significantly more powerful that the units you two have faced so far and has similarities to those "spotters" you have been fighting, but is far more sophisticated.
Reality is distorting in its wake, the entre unit is displaying some behaviors related to gateway weapons.
I'm also picking up highly secure two-way communications equipment integrated into it.
Right now, what we need is combat data.
So what we'll need you to do is break in there, and try to survive for as long as possible, and keep your eyes on your enemies.
We'll be taking notes.
As if to drive the point, a brief apparition of Jus appears before you, sitting in an arm chair with a pen and notebook readied, an antique pipe sticking out of his helmet.
We shall, of course, make sure that you are both properly compensated for your sacrifices, in addition to the usual resource allocation for your work here.
We'd do it now, but, it is capable of tracing some of these effects and using them to empower itself further.
I have located a possible exit point in the kitchen of your base, so we can resurrect you there for your steak. Otherwise, we now have enough influence here to insert you elsewhere with proper gear and no questions asked.
That includes the other sides here.
I am also picking up a piles of gear in the floors above. Likely gathered from people killed in this anomaly.
On the next floor are multiple Vestige 09AIARs, eleven Vestige 07AIARs with holographic sights, and assorted System League gear, the more interesting ones being the combat drugs and grenades.
The 07AIAR is a bullpup assault rifle with a 30-round magazine. It doesn't fire as fast as an 09' and is marginally less reliable, but is much more accurate and customizable.
In the generator chamber, there are three more 09AIARs, six more 07AIARs, a damaged but still functional 01-PUPPET/AF missing its armaments, a FOMALHAUT-LS-SEPS, a FOMALHAUT-GS-METROID, and an ARCTURUS-CK-TYRFING.
SEPS is a Dead Hand longsword that can unleashes crescent projectiles of a highly caustic acid-like substance.
METROID is a Dead Hand greatsword that can cause necrotic explosions of similar nature to your comrade's spell. It can steal its victims life-force to heal its user.
TYRFING is a Dead Hand combat knife. It needs to be wound up in between the use of its magic. When active, it displays disproportionate power but has a one-in-six chance of destroying itself and its wielder with each use.
As for getting up there, while it is only two floor above you, "jumping higher than most platformer protagonists" isn't actually one of your powers, so if you did burn a hole, you wouldn't really be able to jump through it. We'll just say that you take the long way up.
Follow after Beirus. If we stop to attack the rocs - '12 ixc' and Caladlebolg blast.
Bad news, we're going to need you to die for us again. Good thing you've had practice earlier.
The target is two floors above. The defenses will likely kill you. Stay alive for as long as possible. We need the data.
Good news is, we've managed to get some more influence here. Instead of resurrecting you in a warehouse somewhere, we can also have you pop up with military resources and contacts, no questions asked. Not just the NEE either,
if you want to see how the other half lives.
[COMP: 10/8] Whitmore's Spell
[TRAN: 1] Derp Roc's Spell
[TRAN: 3] Roc #2's Spell
[TRAN: 10] Roc #3's Spell
[UTAR vs. SDEF: 8 vs. 6] Ladle and Spell Attacks on the Rocs
[TRAN: 7] Derp Roc's Resist
[TRAN: 8] Roc #2's Resist
[UTAR vs. SDEF: 5 vs. 6, 8] O'Greenahan opens fire on the Rocs
[LTAR vs. SDEF: AUTOSUCCESS] Plasma Gout
Beirus pauses and nods to you. Caladlebolg materializes in your hand, as you begin to swing, your spell manifests, and time stops.
A circle appears in front of the of trailing roc, and pale lines scatter outwards, shifting with your own trajectories as to intercept them. Well, that's new; but it takes a little more than just novelty to stop you. You adjust the trajectories, and soon enough find a firing solution that doesn't get intercepted.
Somewhere, elsewhere, in the nameless void, four cries are heard. And so, the embers of genesis answer, burning their terrible power into the world. Four flames ignite. One fizzles. One implodes. Two survive. They roar into existence.
Oily glops precipitate before you and hurl themselves forwards. Simultaneously, a great crystal of ice appears before the roc in the back, as soon as it appears, it shatters, the great shards, each the length of your arm, exploding towards you in a shotgun-like spray. Meanwhile one of the leading rocs is rocked by an icy explosion that does little save for jamming similar such shards into its own body.
You leap the side, and pivot towards the center, O'Greenahan mirroring your movements from behind, both weapons drawn.
Shards whizz past you, they're awfully easy to dodge when not aimed at
you. Your attacks on the other hand, fly straight through the barrage, striking the front two rocs in their wings. Twin discharges erupt from them, each shaped like a hand, bending back, reaching back into themselves.
One of them fizzles. The roc veers and scrapes along the wall, its wing corroded by the bolts and ripple.
The other, the one belonging to the roc that had already harmed itself in its misfire, succeeds. It discharges, and it crashes to the ground, dead.
The hole in your chest closes, sealing itself shut, along with what other minor cuts and scrapes you sustained on the way in here.
The third roc soars up and accelerates, taking the place of its fallen comrade, greeted by the roar of an AIAR, and the whisper of an ALCYONE, bullets spraying towards both remaining birds. None of them land. The rocs shift their weight, bringing their crescent claws forwards and slashing forth, octarine arcs detonating each and every round.
O'Greenahan however, was already lunging towards them by then, an edgeless blade in his hands. And from it, explodes a radiant blue, and a terrible roar, eclipsing both the arcane discharges, and the battle still raging on outside. He directs it at the healthier of the two foes, and lazily sweeps it to catch the other.
There isn't much left of either. Their front halves having been half-vaporized, half-detonated.
Now with no pressing threats bearing down, the two of you continue upwards. You find yourselves in the penultimate floor. Uniforms, syringes, and grenades lie in one pile. Assault rifles lie in another. The ceiling, and really, everything to do with chamber above is heavily armored. Up the stairs is the entrance to said chamber, and what Jus assures you is your probable door, it is blocked by a heavy blast door.
They're making it awfully tedious to attend your own execution.
"Yes, if not at full strength. I don't suppose you could get me some new legs of some kind? Maybe make some new ones out of the giant monster I smashed?"
Readiness to dodge continues. And so does the conversation.
"...Y-you killed it?"Four of them lower their weapons. All of them take a few steps back. Some more than others. They're staring at you, looking at you as if you're a monster. Well, that's one way to go about it, after all, the distinction between hero and monster can be awfully blurred at times.
"Repairing, uh, not really, legs are complicated, could tape some flattened boxes to your arms so you flap about better I guess(?)"Another one speaks up, and gets slapped on the helmet for their trouble.
"That is dumb and you should feel dumb. Look, gel guy, we don't have that much support right now, but when we clear this place, we can try and order some prosthetics or something and clear this place in the meantime.""You sure about that? He doesn't look like he should be fighting."You hear the click of radio.
"Yes I know I'm saying this out loud, do you want to tell the horrible glass person, no offense, that we don't trust him enough to talk out loud?"Click.
"No? You're sure?"Click.
"Want to share that with the class, or...?""Okay, okay fine! And er... s-sorry pleasedon'thurtme."The clicking person meets your gaze, if only to avert theirs as soon as humanly possible.
"Now that that's out of the way, listen up: we're in a bit of a hurry here - bad news bears showing up if we dilly-dally, so let's get in there and get this over with, we can talk while we're on the move. Now, can you still fight, or am I going to need to carry you?""Aww, I made a pet. I'll name you Princess Pink!"
Take the radioset out and contact my latest boss.
"Ah, hello there. I may have problems with fulfilling your request to observe what you wanted me to observe because my LATRANS got just shredded into pieces. I mean, what kind of idiot built that Alcubierre Drive? It somehow had its particle scoop disabled. Who the fuck does that? And then it got unstabilized AND IT DIDN'T SHUT DOWN! There are rules regarding this shit, and they are for reason! Find the idiot who ignored safety regulations and fire him. Now then, do you still need me to go watch places for you?"
Carefully touch my new pet to confirm its temperature.
Then draw 22 on my 09AIAR and try focus whatever magic power I have into it.
After a few seconds, you hear a strangled sigh that is best described as "the low growl of an enraged, deflating balloon" followed by a period of silence.
"There is a bus inbound. The skeleton driving it will give you your gear and orders. Do not ask about the bodies. Just, go."He hangs up. Or rather stops talking. It'd probably be a lot more impressive if it was a phone rather than a radio.
Hesitantly edging your hand closer to your pet, you find that it is cool to touch, and you aren't dying from super spacemagic poisoning or anything either. It makes a whistling noise in response to your touch and naming of it. As for your attempts at using magic, nothing happens, you just wrote a number on your weapon.
"BZZT! WRONG! Use a conductive loop for that or all you get is some silly scribbles on your death-spitting-murder-stick. Seriously has nobody studied 6th dimensional quantum fluid dynamics in the last millennia?"Comrade and the box can both stay with PUPPET-01, which should stay out of the fight. -04 can come with me to deal with the pez dispensers.
PUPPET-04 should switch to more appropriate evasive patterns, prioritizing raw speed and wide dodges over the twitchy stuff that would leave it in a missile's blast radius. Let it lead, flying overhead so it can shoot down their throats. Use the ECM as/slightly before missiles are fired by watching their internals on sensors, but keep it aimed at the pez dispensers so I don't hit -04. Run in towards their group and make use of my size advantage to pick one up, shoot its head off, and beat up on the others with it. If any fire after the initial batch, try to use my new friend as a shield.
You figure around with the command interface for a bit, setting -04's behaviour profiles. It's a pretty simple system, each profile corresponds to a set of general movement patterns and targeting orders. Just a press of a button and the PUPPET can drastically change its behaviour, great for adapting on the fly. Or, for selecting the wrong one and sending all your autoframes hurtling crotch first into enemy fire. That too. Worrying at first yes, but you generally find your own little way to deal with it.
You set the first profile to be a simple "move to this waypoint, do not fire", that should take it to the warehouse's door, just within the AI's effective radius. The next profile you set covers the wide dodges and fast approach, with an additional override to have it cross over above you - that way you can jam any missiles chasing it.
Really, with only one PUPPET, it's a pretty easy gig all things considered. It only starts getting tricky when you've got multiple, because then you need to account for what happens when one of them gets destroyed. The textbook response of course, is to make use of their triggers to automatically swap profiles. The textbook is wrong.
You
do not use triggers.
You
never use triggers. Relying on a PUPPET's hardware to read your orders is already hit-and-miss, relying on them to read each other's orders and status, is like trying to get a bunch of drunk college students to communicate with each other solely through pelvic thrusts in the middle of an orgy - it does not end well, and you'd be a fool to expect anything else.
You bark your orders to your comrade, and upload your commands to -04. Then, you march to the very threshold of the warehouse, and wait, -04's thrusters burning idly to keep it upright, levitating over the ground. Two missiles scream in desperate arcs, streaking forth to meet you. Then, they detonate. Twin flashes, and then, nothing. No heat, no sound, no shrapnel, they're just gone, erased mid-explosion.
You push the button, and charge.
[MDEF, SDEF vs. UTAR:5, -1 vs. 9, -4, 8, 5] PUPPET attempts to avoid missiles, Iliana attempts to intercept missiles via ECM
[SDEF vs. UTAR: 5 vs. 6-2, 10-2] Iliana attempts to intercept missiles via ECM (again)
[SDEF vs. UTAR: AUTOSUCCESS] Iliana attempts to intercept missiles via ECM (for the third time)
[COMP: 2] Enemy Spell
[COMP: 5/5] Enemy Spell
[COMP: 4] Enemy Spell
[COMP: 1] Enemy Spell
[LTAR: AUTOSUCCESS] Grab and Ballistic Decapitation
[LTAR: AUTOSUCCESS] Smashing a pez dispenser with another pez dispenser
eyes on the puppet
More text pops into in your head, as if you're insane, but apparently not insane
enough to get the full voice package. Unsure of whether to be flattered or offended by that, you follow its advice, it's yet to fail you after all.
Keeping your frame's head trained on -04, or rather it's general direction you continue rushing forwards, relying on the backup cameras to see where you're actually going. Sure enough, you soon see four missiles streaking towards it, prompting it to swerve drunkenly through the air at speeds that you can't really keep pace with.
Time stops. Your body stops. Your mind continues.
You see it, the future. Or something close to it at least. A ghostly images bloom from a reality on pause, you see where -04 is heading, and how the missiles will follow. You see yourself, you see your frame, from the outside, and more phantasms blossom forth. You see your options, what you can do, and how they can affect the outcome. You focus on the ones involving the ECM unit, which as it turns out, happen to be most of them.
Aiming the ECM's blast cone, you sweep it just behind a still image of -04, taking care to note the necessary timing.
Time resumes, you hit the override. -04 sweeps backwards, screeching through the air as you aim your ECM. It's easier than you thought it'd be. It feels like you've practiced it a thousand times. And maybe, in a way, you have.
The first missile flies straight through the zone and into the ground, the other three however, they,
avoid it? That, shouldn't be happening. There's no way they could've detected that, no unless they used where the first one started malfunctioning as a point of reference... but if that were the case, they wouldn't have been able to figure out the exact shape of the affected area, which, judging by how closely they skirted it, you've got reason to believe that they do.
-04 swerves again, accelerating and... crashing straight into a building.
You hear an explosion as the second missile cuts out the frame's feed. The remaining two streak around to meet you.
This time, you know what to expect, which helps, it doesn't help as much as you'd like, but it helps. Half way through the timestop, and you can already tell you won't be getting both. Again, you snare the first, the second one however, crashes straight into your core.
Your backup feeds are replaced with a slew of error messages. Your screen fills with damage warnings. Doesn't matter now. You can see them now, four of them, right up ahead, and all you need to do is close the distance. Close the gap and it's over, close the gap and you can go back. You'll turn in that box, collect your pay, figure out what the hell's happening. All you need to do is keep running.
Their heads bend backwards, and from them erupt more missiles. More missiles that are launched directly into your ECM field; doesn't matter if they can detect it if you're close enough to just hit them before they can take off. They fire again, you put up the field again. You're close now, nearly there, just a few more steps and...
Well, of course they weren't going to make it easy for you. Fire, erupting from the nearest one. Practically an explosion, a massive omnidirectional backdraft, consuming your frame with flame. And then, your reactive armor goes off.
With one hand, you grab the pez dispenser, hoist it up, and impale its head with your rifle before firing. Then, you bring it to bear against its allies.
As you swing your makeshift weapon again and again, reducing both it and your target to twisted masses of scrap, you assess your situation. Your reactive armor is pretty much depleted, you lost most of it thanks to that missile impact, and the rest was lost to the fire, the channels themselves have taken quite the beating as well, so you're not going to be taking as many frontal hits even after they replenish. You've taken a bit more damage to your limbs, shouldn't be affecting performance too much, but the plating's a bit weakened. As for your foes, well, you've basically wrecked two of them, the other two, seem to have ignited themselves in their attempts to pull that same fire attack, and for all their fancy tricks, don't actually have any real way to remove confectionery from their sensors. Okay, the fire
will burn it off, eventually, but, that's time neither of them has.
If the job is still on, do the last plan, drive this thing at max speed across the courtyard/parking lot/whatever right into a door or window of the main building, if the sniper on the roof has time to notice do some back-and-forth weaving to interrupt their aim. Remember to attach my seatbelt before attempting, providing new fancy futurecars don't use them to secure unruly thieves that is.
Once I have broken in, run at full speed in whatever direction looks like it might house archives (it was underground wasn't it? if Decon wants to point me in the right direction, all the better)
Have my gun ready and be mindful of pressure sensitive floors, physical and laser tripwires, especially at the base of doors.
Fortunately, while over the years there have been suggestions for mechanisms like that, they were deemed "dangerous and unethical", in part because constricting to the point where you can't slip out is rather dangerous, even more so for the more, enthusiastic "choke a bitch" designs, and in part because encouraging thieves to not wear seatbelts was met with an altogether rather icy reception.
[MDEF vs. UTAR: 0 vs. -1] Dodging sniper fire.
You rev your new ride a nice blue sedan and charge the barrier, passing through it with ease... perhaps it does something else? Meanwhile, the sniper turns and starts bombarding you with .50 rounds, blowing chunks out of the carpark and turning several vehicles into expensive art pieces with the anti-material rounds.
While several rounds come close, some missing only because you manage to tilt onto two wheels, you use handbrake turns to rapidly dodge like something out of a
Fast and Furious movie, the shots getting noticeably wilder as it presumably dawns on the sniper that whoever, or whatever they are fighting is apparently capable of making a car dodge sniper fire. The comparison continuing to hold as you drift straight into the lobby through a blast of shattered glass, coming to a screeching halt midway through the reception desk.
You can already hear enemies approaching the commotion as you bolt down the fire escape deeper into the complex. As you reach floor -3 there is another line of purple runes and a mirage-like shimmer above them. The tromp of boots echoes behind you.
Author
Topic: Perplexicon - Down the Foxhole - Raining Mecha (Read 179890 times)