"Hooo man, thanks Jal, I was pretty close to being horsefeed there..."
spots the crazytrain heading into the alley
"Oh what is this shit!? Everyone knows the Backalley Outside Space is MY FUCKING TURF! Get out of there, you deadbeat sons of elves!"
Using the fireaxe, smash the brake chain on a minecart train filled up with barreled gremlin tears (the humans keep trading it and we don't know what to do with it) then kick it down the street into the alley. Hopefully it'll crush that pileup of turf-snatching extradimensional morons.
The way you know you're truly in Hell's worse neighborhoods is the abandoned minecarts full of gremlin tears. There's always at least one barrel handy, and always at least one dwarf willing to risk degradation and madness from drinking them in lieu of booze. Thus it's rightfully earned its place as Hell's 3rd least favorite substance among those who can't outbid the people who had it all carted here to begin with.
[No. 3 Coming Up: 3]
Taking advantage of an unfinished set of mag rails you turn a gremlin tear cart toward the Back Alley Outside Space and, with a little doing, launch it at speed into that direction, which does make any demons still in the way get out of it quite readily. Off in the distance there's a crash as the cart fails to turn the corner into the Alley and smashes right through a wall.
Rather uncharacteristically, what spills out of the building are very much frightened dwarves. Much more expectedly, what spills back in are some distinctly overjoyed demons - the slight rain of gremlin tears must add a delightful tang to the apoplectic terror of the survivors as they are set upon by the horde.
On the bright side, the demons ahead seem quite distracted! You are about to tell Jalormis about how the path looks to have cleared up ahead, and notice that while you've been clearing a path ahead he looks to have opened some kind of netherworld rift (you can tell by the ringing in your ears, if nothing else) and slimed a giant butterfly monster, which you choose to count as an effective moment of cooperation as the panicked form of the chased dwarven miner is about to pass you right by.
So basically I, a businessdwarf, must get an unwilling individual to open up their door, eh?
Offer them something in exchange for my safety. If necessary, flaunt the one "money" I have.
You might be tempted to ask how much one money really is. The answer to that, of course, is "enough".
[Do You Want To Make A Deal:
4+1, 5+1]
Listen, you explain quietly to the intercom as you brandish a suitably ostentatious hologram of the wealth you've got on you (the actual number helpfully obfuscated in the vast amounts of financial finagling required to keep yourself barely afloat in Midtown), you're a dwarf of business and also really sick of being out where the demons are, and what the fellow on the other end of this door clearly has is a marketable service, which is a seemingly safe place to keep oneself arrive until security happens to arrive and sort all this shit out. So there's two ways this can go, you explain, either he acts like a civilized dwarf and lets you pay him a frankly ridiculous amount of money for merely opening a door, or you can stand around here and keep attracting attention to his little hidey-hole. Such as that, you pause a moment in legitimate concern, that twelve-foot horned fellow staring at you from the end of the hall, rubbing its three-fingered hands together as the eyeless darkness behind the robe peers in your direction.
Could wait for you to get murdered by demons and take your shit, the voice retorts. Ah, you argue back, but that would mean he was still opening the door and getting your money, except with a lot more risk of getting mauled by whatever demon made you a corpse to begin with - and you're not exactly an easy one to murder, if you may say so yourself.
There's a moment of quiet as you lean in toward the sensor. Glancing back down the hall, you notice that the horned figure seems to have disappeared. Or maybe just run off someplace without making any kind of sound, which may in fact be even worse. You look all around you to make sure the damn thing isn't literally behind you or something, but before you're fully satisfied the door does open a titch, and you are dragged inside by a mechanical claw, the door snapping shut right behind you as several dozen countermeasures pop back into place not just on the door itself, but also the surrounding wall from the looks of it.
The apartment is of the studio variety, or rather converted into one with a bit of hard work. The windows seem to have been bricked shut and the only thing illuminating the inside is the blue glow of several dozen server banks, in the middle of which on a custom throne there sits a dwarf. Well, he doesn't exactly sit - he appears to be missing any organic bits from about the waist down, and looks to have grafted himself onto the throne, which towers over the rest of the room, bristling with twin laser cannons that could very likely cut you into twenty thousand pieces in about a second flat.
It takes you a moment to notice that the dwarf himself is just a screen, an image projected on the top of a protective shield of some kind that he seems to have put up for the moment. In addition to that you see a great many sensors in the room - motion, electromagnetic, smoke, visual and much more -, each of them linked to hidden weaponry of some kind from the looks of it. The whole place is a minefield of booby-traps infesting the last few remnants of regular dwarven habitation - an old fridge, a washing machine, a table with two empty chairs next to it, a toilet with the seat up visible through the open bathroom door.
He'd like to have his money now, your host says. Feeling like he's got a pretty good argument for such a thing on account of all the extraordinarily heavy weaponry, you wire it straight to an offshore bank of his choosing. He waits for it to clear, wondering if there's any point to keeping you alive when it does.
MAKE SEVERAL QUICK TURNS AND TRY TO REACH THE SEWER!!
[Hell's Sewer: 2]
The trouble with Hell's sewer is twofold, you realize. The first is that a lot of Hell just chooses to drop its raw sewage into the ubiquitous glowing pits, so the sewers aren't really quite as interconnected as one would hope. The second problem, of course, is that a sewer that could get you much of anywhere is pretty far away - at least four blocks from here over at the water tower, which does fortunately look demon-free (although the same can't be said of the four blocks you need to go to get there).
You don't get much time to think about this, mind you, because there are a whole two demonic horrors right on your tail and about to swoop in - until that bony necromancer dude decides to be strangely helpful and somehow web up Nuxkagoslust right the hell up, taking them out of the sky with a satisfying crack of their terrible carapace followed by hateful screeching in the abyssal tongues as the weird lady leaps over the body, clearly now in the lead in the race to get to you.
You look at the necromancer - he tells you to come with him if you want to live. Which is odd, because from the look of him you wouldn't say living is something he's had much experience with in the past several decades.
Use my magic to create a web of ectoplasm to restrain the two demons that are chasing that poor dwarf. Try to make it look like that spider demon over there did it (maybe use a will-o-wisp or two to make it look like the spider demon just channeled some magic?).
Then, as always, follow Enir.
If my discord-creating tactic worked:
"You there!" Point at Urist. "Come with me if you want to live!"
Bring Urist with me in our Enir-following train/party thing.
[Trapped In A Spooky Web: 6+1]
The best thing about massive fatalities is unquestionably the easy availability of corpses right after in a variety of shapes and sizes. But the second best thing is definitely all the ghosts - so many ghosts, you don't even know. Well,
you know, of course, you're a necromancer. But most everyone doesn't. Especially not this elder demon just flying about like they own the place. Which technically they do, ancestrally-speaking, but still, they don't know jack. Which leads you into the third best thing about massive fatalities - these ghosts? They're goddamn pissed.
The heat of the rising air suddenly turns to a deathly chill as you rip open a localized rift into the land of the dead (hey, if you're gonna bring forth ectoplasm, might as well go big with it) right in the big butterfly-shaped bastard's path and the stupid thing just flies right into it - the ghosts adhere to its form like flypaper, covering it in a thick layer of what is in polite society called ectoplasm and in regular society is merely known as ice cold ghost snot, the sheer mountain of it immediately grounding the beast as they slam into the ground with a wet splortch, getting snot everywhere as they slide surprisingly far forward, shadowy wings all stuck together and tangled up as they writhe on the ground, ghosts still streaming out of the rift (not just the victims either, you definitely see a couple of party crashers in there).
On the altogether more negative side, what follows next is that the dwarf-shaped demon leaps handily (and, you note, a bit cheekily) over the prone form of the struggling butterfly demon and continues to sprint in your direction, seemingly thoroughly enjoying herself as her mouth hangs open. Strangely there is little bloodlust in her eyes - this genuinely does seem to be a mere game to her.
Having caused what would in most circumstances be an undeniable disaster up the street, you look back at Enir and see what she's been up to down it - the answer to that question seems to be that she's caused a separate yet mostly unrelated disaster involving a magnetically propelled minecart full of gremlin tears and a whole bunch of frightened dwarves that are now being eaten and brutalized by demons, not necessarily in that order.
Jalormis, Extremely Undead Guy
Alternatively Souled: Vampire
Money: 2
Old Yeller: A Horrific Debt
Evil Minion: the Honorary Zombie
The Abyssal Players: Escaped Instrument
Too Close: 2
Enir Nazush, Barmaid of the Night
Alternatively Souled: Vampire
Weapon of Choice: Fire Axe
A Pair of Beat-Up Roller Skates (worn)
Outfit: Awful Schoolgirl-Dominatrix Uniform
Personal Therapy Assistant: Overjoyed
Death's Gate: Too Many Vampires
Old Yeller: Left To One's Devices
Break Yo Shins: Down Payment
Money: 3
Too Close: 1
Urist mac Slughterfiend, Miner on the Edge
Money: Flat Broke
Gruesome Insolvency: Surreal Debts
Eyes of the Butterfly: Foiled!
Green-Eyed Lady: The Hunt Is On
Too Close: 3
Cazin Crundle-Smasher, Uncanny Bookkeeper
Money: Broke
Old Yeller: Hopefully Dead
Too Close: 2
Closed-Circuit: Guest at the Bachelor Pad
The Threadspinners: Observed
Author
Topic: Cyberdwarf: Concession and Cancellation in a Far-Future Fortress (Read 15135 times)