STARLIGHT"Sure.. I think I saw some hard stuff in the workshop."
Timo speaks up. "Don't forget your powers too, Suzy. Maybe you can jazz up breakfast a bit, turn it into something tasty."
Lets try out my powers. Gather a bowl of nutritious gruel and see if I can turn it into real Nutriwheat! gruel. Maybe I can even make the protein flavoring a bit more jazzed up, like a bit of real mustard!
Then, after eating, lets head over to the workshop and find a nice target to try out the sword on. Stab!
Same with her own powers. Lets try all three. Lasers, heat rays, and electricity, one at a time.
You take a bowful of nutritious gruel from the tanks at the back of the ship, and attempt to transform it into something with a different structure.
2
A few minutes later, the gruel is a thin layer of carbon adhering to what remains of the bowl. Might have projected a bit too much heat there.
You move on to combat testing. You suit up, your voidsuit specially modified to allow energy projection, and carry out a series of worn iron target dummies, and stand on the surface of the ship, boots easily gripping the rough surface, tossing them into the wide spaces between chunks of planetary core and watching them drift slowly downwrds. Couldn't exactly give your powers free reign back on the Needle but out here it shouldn't really matter.
Your inital lasers are powerful enough to melt iron, leaving incandescent orange and white patches, even gaping holes in the metal when you manage to hit with a sustained burst. The lasers are however hard to aim, especially when the targets tumble erratically about, and you often miss, the laser carving dull red lines of hot metal across the chunks of iron floating around the ship.
Waves of heat affect much larger areas, but aren't strong enough to do anything to the metal dummies, only burning off a couple of straps and bits of string still attached. Electricity generally doesn't hit, instead crackling harmlessly about the gauntlets of your suit, once or twice arcing down your suit to the tough sides of the voidship. Not enough atmosphere out here to throw lightning.
The Stride Blade is something else entirely. You secure the last two of targets, take the long handle of the sword in two hands, and move it back awkwardly, the blade pointing behind you, ready to take an experimental swing. Even for someone with your improved physique, greatswords are not easy to use.
You move the sword in an arc, swinging it almost horizontally at the level of yours shoulders, a blow capable of decapitating an ordinary human. The first dummy's crude head tumbles away into the void, the stride blade cutting through the thick iron with ease. As you finish your swing, the blade doesn't slow down but starts to move faster, leaping in your grip to point at the other target and accelerating towards it. In an instant, you're pulled towards the dummy and then
through it, finishing the motion on one knee with your right arm extended, the sword pointed straight ahead of you, perfectly still. Looking back, the target has been torn in half, the head and most of the torso gone, the legs and sides swaying independently. The whole process took less than a second.
"Hmm well isn't that interesting..."
Steve attempts to figure out how to activate the thing that detaches the front of the ship... just in case
5
After spending some time studying the controls, you deduce that it's a pretty simple sequence of inputs, something you could do with only two limbs. Nice! These controls are a lot simpler than they look.
“Thanks.” Lucca takes some of Steve’s blood and Analyze’s it and checks if he can make some “Modifications”.
You focus your psionic intuition on Steve's blood sample, and consider his genetic code. It all looks like a pretty standard boring humanoid, the kind of uninteresting mess you get in societies that have advanced technologically past natural selection but haven't introduced heavy genetic modification yet. So... a lot to improve on.
It would be quite easy to write in a few large-scale changes and make him slowly become a bit stronger, faster, or sturdier. It would also be a fairly simple matter to make his cells a bit more suited to the harsher environments he might be facing, a bit more disease-resistant, better at storing energy, that sort of thing. You could start those modifications at once, if you like. It wouldn't be as much as the sustained changes someone or something has been making to Suzy's body, but it would be worth doing.
Sadly, you can't see any obvious paths to more interesting mods: no latent telepathy in his genetic code, no ancient predator genes to make him a were-creature, no genetic switches to flip and make him grow armour plating or poison sacs. Anything like that you're going to have to use your own store of weird genes and implant stuff, a much more involved process.
(I was mainly waiting to see if anybody else intended to make requests regarding the drones. Evidently, no.)
Varisdel sends a few drones immediately ahead, while having the rest scan - but not harvest - the planet as a whole.
You release the drones from one of the airlocks, watching as the machines scatter. A handful turn and push ahead of the ship, scanning the areas immediately above it. The rest fan out across the exploded core of the planet, controlling their course with short, economical bursts of fuel. It will be a while before those are back within range.
The drones you sent ahead reveal a vein of Obdurite, a lesser cousin to adamantine, very hard and light, quite easy to work. The voidships stops briefly for you to harvest it from the huge chunks of mantle you're now passing through. Extracting the metal from the ore is easy enough, and by the end you're left with five bars. You could probably barter it for something useful or keep it around for repairs, new devices, etc.
After several hours more, the ship reaches a long gap in the floating chunks of planetary core, stars visible ahead. It picks up speed and traverses hundreds of kilometres in a few hours, moving straight towards open space, and only slowing once you reach the outskirts of the shattered crust. The lights of a settlement on what used to be the surface of the planet are visible a few hundred miles away, while open space beckons just above. Even without an atmosphere, the sight of dawn over the broken world is spectacular, the sun rising on huge overturned mountains, glinting on jagged slabs of rock and metal strung out like beads in space.
As you look out of the bridge windows, Suzy catches a glimpse of something above you. It's barely visible, just a shifting region of the sky where the stars are a little dimmer, the darkness between them a little lighter. It loops and darts across the void above you, a long outline against the blackness, long, twisting and incredibly large. It's not something any of you recognise: Varisdel is pretty sure it's not mechanical, the Stride Blade knows it isn't a Chasm creature, and Lucca can't remember his people creating something like this. Perhaps this is the thing that protects the remains of this planet.
Status: Fully intact
Fore:
- Bridge
- Varisdel's box, currently empty
- Engine room (Elder Xelqu Heart, Psionic)
Central:
- Quarters
- Suit Room (4x standard armoured voidsuits, fitted)
- Infirmary
- General Storage
- Biological regulation garden (waste disposal etc)
Aft:
- Secondary Storage Chambers: Nutrient Stock, Gene Library, Titan
- Pods
- Main Airlock
Movement:
- Psionic propulsion via Xelqu Heart
- Chasm Traversal (requires mounted Stride Blade)
Weaponry:
- Cleavers: huge detachable metal blades, psionically controlled. Also useful for traversing fluids.
- Secondary: flechette cannons
Varisdel has five bars of obdurite.
Suzy has a briefcase that can be turned into a tank.
Steve has a pair of sunglasses and a laser pen.
Aside from that, it's just whatever sentimental junk and threadbare clothing people chose to bring with them.
Sorry that took so long, life stuff.
Here’s my character. Could you pm me when I get put into the game?
I'll pm you.
Author
Topic: Solar Graveyard - Starlight (Read 23367 times)