Topic: Web of Life: A Drider's Adventure (Ended) (Read 190280 times)

RAM · « **Reply #1665 on:** March 10, 2018, 08:29:03 pm »

Go home, get help. Sucy knows a bit of medicine and druglore, but more importantly Meandra seems as good a judge of magic as anyone down here. These tattoos are- don't want to think about it... Let's pay a visit to Death too, our soul has been through the ringer since we last spoke and we should apologise for the extra workload. And lets see if we can get our own arm back. We don't know all of where this arm has been, and what we do know isn't comforting. Maybe we can sell the hand... or keep it as a spare. The market for claw-hands is probably small... outside of wherever we were last night...

omada · « **Reply #1666 on:** March 11, 2018, 12:14:11 pm »

I don't feel regret at all for making alexia go to the slaneeshi, next time alexia should yell "I'M SLANEESHI INCARNATION" or better make the shaman say that alexia is their godess

cof cof

Now more seriously, I fear what it could have been done with her, she should go home, and discover if these claws are that kind of prosthetic that need those fucking drugs or not.

For the future, if we kill the old crone, sting our baby on her, what kind of spider will breed from a drider? and THAT DRIDER!

Liquefied Spleens · « **Reply #1667 on:** March 11, 2018, 05:06:54 pm »

It's fortunate that it's still early in the morning. You don't want to think about what would happen if enough people saw you in this state, and you would never be able to explain yourself to the police. Your hands won't stop shaking, for some reason. You also feel oddly cold, despite the warm robes. Like your outside is warmer than your inside, if that makes sense. Finding where you are is a bit of a problem, too, but the town is built to be easy to navigate. You just need to stay around the outskirts, where you can see a massive sign from one of the taller buildings in the centre of town. You make sure to keep yourself covered for the few early birds that get out. You get a few looks, but nothing you aren't used to already. The drider part probably matters more to them than the strange robes, and as always they have better things to do than worry about what you are. Eventually, you find a street you recognize, a little before the sunstone officially starts glowing properly. You knock on the door, though you can't stop yourself form dry-heaving into the bushes next to the door for a few seconds. Taking a breath was, apparently, not something your body appreciates. You must look awful.
You hear Meandra's voice, but you can't understand what she's saying as you still stare at the ground, dizzy and dehydrated. You feel hands around your shoulders, and you are ushered inside. You start understanding languages again as you find your bearings.
We've been looking for you all over the city ever since your minions spelled your warning out. I'm glad to see you're... alright? Well. You're still standing, I suppose. And you got an arm! That's lovely.
I feel really bad...
Okay, okay... Let's get you to bed, for now. I'll get the rest of the guys back here while you rest.
You mumble out thanks, and manage to find your way to your bed. You leave your kids with Meandra, though. They need somebody else to take care of them while you try to reach a semblance of normality in your brain again. You basically collapse on the soft materials, not even removing your robes before descending into sleep.

You are plagued with nightmares. The ritual comes back to your mind, the pain you had almost forgotten back in full force as things tear themselves in two, melt and twist. You can't move, forced to watch as the gore and violence goes on around you. You feel their clammy, sharp hands reach up from the ground, and pull you into the mud. You see yourself die in hundreds of ways.
Finally, you see something you've never seen before. A long slender thing, with a myriad of sharp metal legs. It looks reinforced with a sharp, knife-like brace on every leg, but the body looks fleshy, albeit emancipated. Three ribcages, and arms placed haphazardly along it. It looks like a fleshy, maiming totem, every arm ending in a shard of metal or glass. Some placed on top of the hand, some as crude prosthetics. It leans over, every which way, and way at the top two grotesque faces spin. They scream. They won't stop screaming. One in pain, the other in maniacal pleasure. You see the creature tearing its allies apart as they fasten more and more tools of war to this grisly fourlegged husk.
You awaken screaming.
You spend the rest of the day drifting in and out of awareness. Sometimes, you just end up staring at a wall for a long while, and some other times you're extremely aware of everything. It makes you paranoid too, although that only became clear to you in retrospect. It was kind of embarrassing, but after Sucy explained to you (with great enthousiasm) what was in your bloodstream, people were a lot more understanding about how you were acting. Apparently, the cocktail that was in you was enough to kill an average human, with a dangerous amount of "uppers" and hallucinogenics. Not to mention, a collection of "mystery components". Sucy is quite excited to try and figure them out, but from what she can gather there's most certainly a magical element to it all. She even managed to pull some kind of plantlike THING out of your blood, using some of her floramancy. You forgot she could do that, to be honest, but it doesn't exactly come up a lot.
You made sure she doesn't keep that thing outside of a heavily secured glass box. As it stands it's little more than a green bud, but you don't like the chances of that thing being harmless.

You still feel kind of awful, but you seem to have shaken off most of the "hangover". Most of your team is still kind of waiting on an official statement from you, considering you spent the better part of a day drifting in and out of consciousness (not that you slept, you just kinda turned borderline vegetative at times), and whenever you WERE conscious, you just started yelling and ranting about the eldritch infesting people. After you tried to lick Hal's face to "check for bugs" they decided to leave you be.
Seems like resting actually makes the whole thing worse, somehow. Although it's needed to come down from it? You can't follow anymore.
You did get an opinion from Meandra about the arm, though. The arm is actually biological, and grafted on your stump. Meaning you can't replace that part unless you chop the damned thing off, which you aren't exactly hyped for nor actually willing to do. The hand is a custom model, so there's no way to know whether you need something against rejection without a doctor present...

Go find a doctor
You need to get yourself cleaned up. You feel a lot better, but who knows. Of course, doctors are well-known, and you were easy to find last time...

Make an official statement to your friends, and explain how that happened in the first place.
You don't remember that much, but you do remember Alexia taking charge and going to some kind of party...

Get in contact with the shadowrunners
Snip and Kai need to know there's a bounty on their head from some very powerful organisation.

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Devastator · « **Reply #1668 on:** March 11, 2018, 05:38:02 pm »

Can we do all three? We could tie a message to our cat or bird and send it to one or the other shadowrunner. And we can head to a doc while explaining what happened to our friends. Probably have to be another BM doc, though, as we just killed dozens of people and are probably loaded with illegal stuff.

RAM · « **Reply #1669 on:** March 11, 2018, 05:59:11 pm »

Quote from: Devastator on March 11, 2018, 05:38:02 pm

Can we do all three? We could tie a message to our cat or bird and send it to one or the other shadowrunner. And we can head to a doc while explaining what happened to our friends. Probably have to be another BM doc, though, as we just killed dozens of people and are probably loaded with illegal stuff.

+1
Sent kitty with a message to Kai or Snips. It isn't exactly easy to get a message to a specific runner, but it could try the usual dives and haunts, and a message sealed in a water-proof bag should be easy enough to keep in its mouth. Also get Meandra's father onto that, he did get us into this job in the first place and the driders definitely weren't mentioned in the mission-brief... Passing along a message through an intermediary should be within his ability and fairly safe, and he ought to owe us at least to the extent of letting our former team know how very much worse the mission was than it appeared.

Can we get a vehicle to talk in with some privacy, or hire one for the trip to the doctors? So we can speak in some measure of comfort?

What can we see through our bird?

Egan_BW · « **Reply #1670 on:** March 11, 2018, 05:59:16 pm »

Black market doctor. If some bloody idiot drider comes to find us again, we can probably now recall enough of Alexia to put a claw through their torso.

omada · « **Reply #1671 on:** March 11, 2018, 08:48:42 pm »

guys... the bird is missing for two updates in a row, now that we rested and aren't in a big chance of sleeping in the road we should try to see through pigeons eyes and ask our friends what happened to the bird

Liquefied Spleens · « **Reply #1672 on:** March 12, 2018, 05:02:12 pm »

I think I need a doctor. I mean, I feel a lot better, but I also kind of feel like my heart might still give out at any point.
Eh, you've got two of those, right? Hal says. You look at him with an eyebrow raised. He seemed a little disappointed at finding out that you don't, in fact, have two hearts. You got a single heart, left side of your body. Seems strange that he wouldn't know that, but then again, there aren't a lot of driders around.
Well, that's what you used to think, at any rate.
You decided to take a couple friends with you on your way to a doctor, this time. Considering it led to (yet another) kidnapping when they left you alone, they didn't mind. Meanwhile, you explained to them what happened. They seemed rather surprised to discover there are actually a ton of driders in the udnerground, and especially that there's a massive thousand-year-old drider that gives off crazy gas. You admit that it's actually really amazing, and that it would probably be a twist of epic proportions in most other stories. Unfortunately, this is Web of Life, where special moments are denounced with purple prose. That shit wasn't purple, it was beige at best. So it doesn't matter THAT much, it's more of a "here's another problem for the growing pile".
Well, until things get weird.
Speaking of weird, you tell them of what you remember from Alexia's moments. You distinctly remember killing two guards to get out of the drider palace, though you don't feel bad about it. You were willing to kill people to get out from the outset. More importantly, though, you remember her going to a Slaaneshi rave. Not something the others were too keen on hearing, apart from Sucy, who seemed positively delighted to hear it. Of course, when the drugs started to take hold you can't remember a single thing. And you're just kind of assuming drugs were involved in the amnesia. Getting to that rave was kinda fuzzy, too.

You return to the doctor that fixed your eye, and he seems quite glad to see you again. Apparently, you're the first one he knows of that came back after getting taken by the driders. Apart from himself, of course. He understood your problem quite clearly, as he's a habitual user of just about every drug under the sun, though he doesn't use the heavy stuff.
On-duty, anyway.
He takes a look at your arm, and notes that the arm seems to have gone through some abuse before it became a part of you. The claw, on the other hand, is in a bit of weird position. If it was attached to you as is, it would be rejected by your body nigh-instantaneously. BUT, the arm it's attached to seems to have "gotten used" to the claw,by which he eans that the wrist has been growing over the metal parts. This has the advantage of making anti-rejection drugs unneeded, but the downside of needing surgery before it start hurting. It's going to start hurting over time, and just how much you notice is going to be difficult. Still, you should be fine for a month or so. Maybe more. Some people draw power from pain, the doctor notes. After that's been properly explained, you decide to have the doctor take a look at your general health, post-rave.
After a quick test, he noted that you picked up an addiction. A physical dependancy, at any rate. In a few days time you'd start getting cold sweats, minor bouts of added paranoia and a tendency to hallucinate small things. Followed by increasingly bad things until possible heart failure, assuming you have existing conditions. Still, considering it's available, he proposes to flush your system. He hands you a collection of rather large pills, though he takes back two of them after he seems to realize something.
You don' have an anus, do ya?
...I want this to be stricken from this update.
Seriously.
What the heck.
Well, jus' take dese ones instead. And, uh, try to find a toilet you can work with. Purgin' be more of an art than science.
No it's not. We have it down to an almost exact science. You just don't want to admit she's going to spend half a day on the can.
This is the worst update.
This is the worst update we've ever done.
Yunikki groans in displeasure at Sydney's flagrent breaking of the fourth wall. Of course, I am going to point out ahead of time that detoxing your favourite drider is just going to take a day, and that no details will be given. Mainly because it's gross and unneeded, and partially because I don't actually know how Sydney defecates, let alone how she would do it in a human toilet.
There's a reason we just kind of accept these things, aye?
Aye.

Well, you've got your drugs, your friends have a general idea of what happened, and they also told you your bird just kinda dropped dead and burned to ashes in the same moment. Apparently, taking experimental drugs isn't the best for your focus. you'd be torn up about it, but you didn't have a close relationship to that bird. Contrary to your kids, which are still safe with Meandra in the house. You already miss the little tykes. Still, Meandra found a nice little terrarium for them, which they liked well enough. When you came back, however, they strongly preferred to stay on you.
Once you're back at the house, you can look into how you're going to contact the shadowrunners. Sucy has a few ideas on how to get to Snip, but he's changed his contact points again. It'll take about a couple days. There's no way to know where Kai went, he didn't keep any kind of contact.
Meandra's father admits he has no actual way to contact the shadowrunners directly. He placed a contract, and that was with the help of a collection of disgruntled citizens and other companies suffering from the extortion.

You need to find some way to send out feelers. Try to get those thinking caps on, boys, no suggestions on this one. Consider that the gangs are likely to know something, or you could even ask the police to help. They're not incompetent, just a little buried under political red tape.

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RAM · « **Reply #1673 on:** March 13, 2018, 12:21:54 am »

See where the runners spend their money, recreational venues and weapons dealers and such, ask around for people who organise groups for jobs, they should be in the business of being somewhat visible, and ask(probably with some donations to ease things along) them about Kai and Snip.
...
Or just go along with Sucy's thing and get Snip to help. We really just need someone who has any idea at all how this industry works...

omada · « **Reply #1674 on:** March 13, 2018, 03:40:22 pm »

Err, okay, now I got preocupied, the claw is going to hurt more and more with time, we are going to need constant medication or stuff like that until someone remove our arm again?

And the addiction, those fecal moments saved us from addiction?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, we can go to the same place we met Johnson's, he could find the shadow runners

Devastator · « **Reply #1675 on:** March 13, 2018, 04:53:49 pm »

Cutting our own arm off is an option, if not one we'd enjoy doing, and we won't lose our graft power for another replacement. Now it's stupid, but if it's hurting to hell and back, cutting it off would be a lot more appealing.

RAM · « **Reply #1676 on:** March 13, 2018, 05:32:28 pm »

At the moment it doesn't hurt, and pain-killers are far more practical to acquire than immune-suppressants. But definitely keep our original parts "on hand"... as we have really nice natural claws that I want back, and Sucy must have found us a nice elbow to use.

I doubt we will get much from our first meeting-place or the Johnson. They seem to be maintaining a level of anonymity between parties, hence the generic title of "Johnson". We would probably get more from Meandra's father. As for the meeting-place itself, I got the impression that it was specifically for meetings, and runners would normally go somewhere less fancy for other reasons...

omada · « **Reply #1677 on:** March 14, 2018, 12:00:43 pm »

We should see the price of an over-protective glove, maybe we can maintain our grip while wearing it, and remove the glove when we get disarmed, but the pain will be an issue, be always drugged with a pain supressor for life will be bad maybe.

For how much we can chop our claw and sell it?

RAM · « **Reply #1678 on:** March 14, 2018, 04:37:02 pm »

The problem with selling the claw is that Slaaneshi cultists have bad credit ratings.

Liquefied Spleens · « **Reply #1679 on:** March 14, 2018, 04:44:23 pm »

You didn't get the addiction cleansing quite yet. You'll have to make the decision when you spend a day "cleaning".

So you can track them based on purchases, right?
Just about. Shadowrunners keep an open network for pretty much this exact reason, at least for a little while. I can see most purchases in the city. Now, if we go by what we know...
Try cybernetics, first. They can't buy a lot of those here.
True. And he'd have the money for it. I'll look under enhancements, first...
Meandra ticks away at the keyboard, causing more simple blocky letters to appear on this massive square box. These computer things are damned noisy, and you swear it runs on a car engine. Still, it DOES give you a lot of information with just a couple of ticks. You're glad the dwarf allowed you to use it as you were looking at the meeting grounds. There aren't a lot of computers in this city, hell, it might even be the only one in the city.
Here we are. A single purchase of an arm-mounted gun, firing shotgun shells. Bought from a black market deal, which explains the low price. Now, there's no guarantee that it was Kai, but it's pretty likely.
Well, do we have a location of the seller?
Yep. He plays nice with the cops by giving them some of the heftier hardware, saved a couple lives on the force with those. He's a "legitimate seller" as long as you don't ask for the basement.
Well, that's delightfully easy. Any other suggestions?
No. Just a glance at the amount of cybernetics makes it clear it's not practical. Besides, he was more of a modder on his arm, right?
I think. Right, should I go alone?
It's right at the police station, if they wanna attack you there, they'd have to do a lot of work. There are a lot of wanted driders... None of them teal, so don't worry.
I'm glad it's a rare colour, at least.
Rare among sentient driders. That slave traded is starting to push through in the second level.

The buyer was quite amicable, in that "greasy used carriage salesman" sort of way. He was quite happy to sell you a protective glove for that claw, after he gushed about its make for a while. Apparently, these claws are top of the line rending tools, tipped with diamonds and reinforced with titanite. It's not nearly as impossibly rare as it would be on the surface, of course, considering the dwarves have been digging holes for quite some time now. Still, it's good stuff.
The over-time pain is actually a known side-effect, oddly enough. It's sort of an in-between before they figured out how to make the limbs play nice.
The gloves set you back about 20 dollars. It's worth it, though. You have 290 dollars left.
As for finding out where Kai is, he was a little difficult to get talking, but he caved when you told him it's to warn him of an incoming assassination. He wasn't too keen on losing a high-value customer, and he remembers hearing from him about you enough that he's willing to take a chance on telling you where he was going. Apparently, he landed a contract for the Ronin that involved major crowd control. His guess, they want to clear out of quarantined tunnel to use as another base. Lots of critters can be found there, most of them working in sheer numbers.
You thank the man for his help, and the gloves, and he tells you NOT to tell your friends about him.
You consider just keeping these claws, now that you can hold things again without fear of murdering said thing. The pain should take quite a while to set in, so it's a straight advantage for the moment.

Go find Snip, first.
Best not to go somewhere that might take up a lot of time before warning him. Those tunnels sound confusing.

Have your friends look for Snip while you go to the tunnels with some friends of choice(or alone)
We should look at this from a practical standpoint, aye?

Go home and discuss the findings.
It seems a little too easy. Maybe somebody realises a set-up, somewhere.

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Author Topic: Web of Life: A Drider's Adventure (Ended) (Read 190280 times)

RAM

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omada

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Liquefied Spleens

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Devastator

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RAM

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Egan_BW

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omada

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Liquefied Spleens

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RAM

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omada

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Devastator

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RAM

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omada

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RAM

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