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[Man of Paper]

I don't think you know what those words mean.

[Rockeater]

The Brain Chip: (0)
The Transmutation Engine: (1) Iris
SMART Rifle: (0)
Redoak War treant: (5) Frostgiant, Knightwing64, Kashyyk, Stirk, Hawk
11.43×23mm Caliber handgun: (0)
2x200mm handgun: (0)
Intrasystem Mass Acceleration Cannon: (0)
Quicklime Bellows: (0)
Shadow Aperture: (0)
Skybreaker: (0)
SOLAR Satellite: (7) MoP, m1895, Doomblade, Glass, King Zultan, Secretdorf, Rockeater

[Powder Miner]

Synchronized Orbit Light Artillery Radiator Satellite (S.O.L.A.R. Satellite)

Mageistrate Cuthbert approached the Command Canopy, where everything important in Oakhearth took place. He pressed his thumb to a small resin screen and expressed the most minor bit of magic into it. Once the device confirmed his magical signature there was a beep and the twisted mass of roots and vines that acted as the door to the Command Canopy unfurled and pulled into the walls. Cuthbert straightened his tie and stepped in.

Standing around a table were the Mageistrates representing the other megaflora cities, and atop said table was a viewing screen made of liquid resin behind a thin pane of glass. Cuthbert shook hands with everyone present before eventually taking control of the meeting.

"Today is a big day for our people. From Oakhearth to Cycad City, Valley of the Lilies to Chamomile Cove, our people have just managed to thrive amid the constant threat of sporestorms. As everyone is well aware, these sporestorms have prevented exploration of a large portion of our planet, and their origin had been unknown for millennia. Now, after a decade of seeding orbit with the most advanced scrying equipment and well-trained arbornauts possible, we have located the cavern which the accursed spores emit from."

Cuthbert waved his hand over the viewing screen and the resin within shifted and colorized until it provided a clear view of a massive barren land surrounding a gaping hole in the earth. As they watched, as if burping, a blast of sporecloud fired out to drift around and eventually be deposited by air currents near or over the megaflora cities.

"So we can see the source, but what help is that? We've been able to accurately predict the coming of sporestorms for decades now without issue," one of the Mageistrates interrupted as he lifted a stick of pressed tobacco to his lips, the tip lighting up as he inhaled and dying out once it was removed from his lips, "It's not like we can march or fly through the Sporewall without withering away. Fire has only been able to do so much."

"Which is why," Cuthbert responded, "Oakhearth has begun launching modified scrying satellites into orbit."

There was brief protest which Cuthbert silenced with a wave. It was amazing what a family's name did for power and influence.

"We have a number of satellites that the crew has locked into geosynchronous orbit over the spore wastes. In a few minutes you will all bear witness to the greatest societal shift in the history of our people: the eradication of the spore menace at its source."

----

SOLAR Satellites are made of a hardened light wood covered in a potent alchemical mixture which prevents the wood from burning during launch as well as protect the crew from radiation. SOLAR Satellites resemble a flowering bulb, with the petals covered in light-absorbing materials. Pointing these at the sun charge the capacitor banks within the satellite to provide near-limitless power to the satellite and its weapon. Arbornauts manning SOLAR Satellites use a number of liquid-resin screens to adjust bearing and fine-tune aiming at targets on the planet below.

The weapon itself is a mass of artificial roots that spread out from beneath the SOLAR Satellite and all come together to a point. The pure light energy stored within the capacitors is channeled through photo-synthesizers which add artificial light to a growing "mass" of light bound within the roots. Once the roots reach maximum capacity the Arbornauts within can fire the weapon, unleashing a beam of extremely powerful focused light onto their targets below.

Shuttles can be used to cycle crewmen.

Difficulty: Hard
Roll: (3+5)-1=7, Average.

The Synchronized Orbit Light Artillery Radiator Satellite, or S.O.L.A.R. Satellite for short, because not even druidic engineers can resist the allure of an occasional backronym, is an attempt at striking back at one of civilization's largest and most enduring issues - and striking back at it with aplomb. Setting up a satellite chassis was ultimately a fairly easy process, given our experience with building spacecraft in the past decades; techniques of treating wood in order to alter its physical properties go back for centuries, and we've had the time to work the wood and alchemical treatments that we use in our satellites into a state more than sufficient to ensure no problems with launch, even with the adjustments required to build the satellite around a massive weapon. The solar array took a little more work, although it itself was still just an adaptation of the arrays that power most of our satellites.

Constructing the petals of the arrays and even fine-tuning their material makeup to absorb more light didn't present much problem, but ultimately what taxed us a bit more was working on transferring that power through that satellite. Electronics is a relatively new field, and dealing with conductors, semiconductors, and insulators within a project this powerful and this high-end presented some difficulties, especially since we wanted our output to be a laser capable of piercing through the atmosphere and deep into the ground from space, and especially since we had to interface it with a magical system integrated with the laser. Ultimately, we did get a massive solar laser, and one that is indeed capable of firing that giant laser down into the cavern that the diviners have over the centuries nailed down as the source of the accursed sporestorms. That laser was a beautiful sight indeed, streaking downwards at our pale green dot through the camera feed of the satellite - but it didn't quite accomplish our goal.

While the laser was indeed powerful enough to hammer into the largest entrance of that infamous cavern, something which does typically manage to stop any given sporestorm from exiting and shrouding our continent, it isn't actually powerful enough to then burrow through several layers of rock and stone, and we don't have a way to precisely target and destroy whatever is actually producing those spores - worse, we haven't seemed to be able to permanently collapse all cavern entrances. In effect, then, we've been able to suppress the sporestorms so long as we've got active satellites, but not end them. Thankfully, we do have several up here, so although very occasional partial sporestorms do occur whenever misalignments or malfunctions occur, we have been able to enter a new age of exploration.

Difficulty: Easy
Roll: (2+3)+1=6, Average

The Defense Emplacement for Terrestrial-Orbital War via Emission of Radiation, or T.O.W.E.R. Defense Emplacement, is our attempt at adapting the technology used within our S.O.L.A.R. Satellites in the opposite direction, firing large lasers out from ground-based emplacements. By necessity, this project is something of a scaling down of the S.O.L.A.R. Satellites, involving emplacements of differing size and variable intended range; despite the name, only some of our emplacements are truly intended to fire all the way out into orbit (especially as these are lasers and have to deal with beam dispersion without having quite the power source of the S.O.L.A.R. Satellites), with many of them instead designed to strike craft either as they enter from low orbit, or as they attack in the skies themselves.

Even though building defensive emplacements terrestrially necessitated that we find new power systems for our emplacements, especially with the increasing recent interruptions in the S.O.L.A.R. Satellite system resulting in increasing numbers of sporestorms, we were able to get around this issue through applying the advancements we've made in alchemical biofuel engines in recent years in the colonies, with each emplacement powered by a large but surprisingly efficient biofueled engine. The end result is that, although we did have to accept some sacrifices in power in the beams for the sake of the size and reliability of the platforms, we have several T.O.W.E.R. Defense Emplacements stationed in our cities and settlements all over our planet.

These have proved effective at destroying some of the medium-sized ships coming through our atmosphere in the first wave, but have not proved universally effective - smaller ships have been too agile to hit, and the largest ships of the invaders, though not immune to damage, appear to be tough enough not to be destroyed by our beams without very serious concentration.

[Powder Miner]

...

Your head hurts. There's something that feels like it dried and crusted over across your face, and it feels terrible. You can't open your eyes. There's something heavy across your back and legs. Something stings around your legs. You're not sure. You can't think clearly. You feel sick. Everything hurts, actually. You're on something hard. It hurts, but you can't get up. You can't hear clearly, beyond the ringing, but it sounds like there's a scraping noise. You can't process it, though. You're tired. You don't know what's going on.

...

You open your eyes, and the the blast of light is agonizing - instinctively, you try to groan, but it's just a deathly quiet whisper of breath that escapes from your throat. Eventually, the image of your vision stabilizes into something... partially. The world is something blurry, and you still can't tell for sure what is going on. At first, all you can see is a mixture of colors - brown, blue, green, black, red. As you lie there for a while, however, noting that practically your entire body is lit up in varying levels of discomfort and pain, those colors gain definition. Where are you? You're in a building - a wooden one, but not one built of planks, one where gnarled slabs and root-like columns of differing shades intertwine and heavily reinforce each other, meeting at the top as they form a dome shape. A massive hole has been blown out of one side of this dome, the bright blue sky shining through to light up the room and sting your eyes. Scorch marks dot the large room you're in.

Slowly, painfully, you swivel your head to look at yourself - you seem to be trapped under pieces of wood and resin and occasionally twisted electronics, with a particularly heavy block of wood over your legs, and smaller pieces on and around you. Dried blood marks the floor all over your immediate area. Yours? Contained around your head and legs, at least. You try to move the wood on your legs, but for now you're still too weak. It hurts incredibly to do so, but you turn your head again. You're on some sort of catwalk, ringing the room you're in and acting as a second floor, whereas downstairs the room is arranged around a huge central table and a set of smaller desks, doors and... cabinets...? Probably. You can't quite tell. You're also not the only person in the room - many other people dot the catwalk and the lower floor. They are not moving. Something is moving - you still can't see well enough to make out the details, but some sort of spider-like entity is moving itself across the floor. It is the color of metal, and all you can tell is that it is full of angles. It moves slowly forward, and stops at each of the unmoving people for a few moments, and then moves on, sauntering out a smaller hole opened in the building.

Your head still hurts, and it hurts incredibly. It feels like your legs were cut up, too. You're thirsty, and hungry.

...

The wood isn't on your legs, anymore. Actually, you aren't lying down at all, and nothing is on you. You're sitting down, propped up against the wooden railing of the inner ring of the catwalk, and surrounded by wrappings of rations - fruits, vegetables, grain products, what look to be some sort of... processed... nut products...? It looks like about half of them have been eaten. You don't remember getting untrapped, or getting these, or eating these. But your vision is a little clearer now, and so are your thoughts, even if the way your head hurts still is unbearable and keeps threatening to pull you away from your... from your trains of thought.

It looks like you were under the remnants of some sort of device that had been mounted on a large tower box. You don't know what it was, but sliding your fingers over a shard of solid resin, you know that it went into a screen. This had to have been a computer of some sort, which would explain the composition of the wreckage you were trapped under. There's one more thing, which you think was under your hip while you were still trapped. It used to be a handhold device, though it's now broken in half, looking like nothing more than a strange pair of blocks of wood and resin bound by cabling and roots. Well, actually, there is a metal cylinder in one of those blocks, too. You play with it lightly, blankly, for a few minutes. ...a handheld laser, maybe? Not anymore.

...

The set of wrappers around you has grown larger. A few days' worth by now, for sure. Again, you don't remember grabbing them - but the mystery is lessened a bit when you start looking around once more. It looks like there's a ration box on the large table downstairs, which you probably made a dent in? It looks like this was meant to feed a large amount of people, but... something happened. Something... something... you look up at the hole in the roof again, and then at what are increasingly clearly corpses littering the rest of the room, and even still the obvious conclusion takes a frustratingly long time to click. Oh. Looking at those corpses again, more things become clear. You can't identify who those people are, but that isn't the issue - if they weren't simply killed by some piece of debris or shrapnel or explosive force, many of them appear to have had massive stab wounds opened through their chests, as if impaled by something long and slim. One of the bodies is clutching a piece of the reinforcement wood from the walls, cracked and barely holding together.

It's not a mystery you have to ruminate for long, as the spider-like being returns. As it walks past, now that you get a better look at it... it looks to be some sort of constructed being, and probably electronic in nature, but instead of being constructed with wood and resin, it's constructed entirely out of materials like metal and glass. Faintly, something about that seems extremely bizarre, but you can't put your finger exactly on why. Although you've internally been describing it as "spider-like", it walks on four jointed legs, with short upper sections and long, thin, tapering lower sections which sharpen down to stiletto-like tips. These tips, of course, are covered in dried blood. The central orb of the being is covered in glass lenses and sensors, but several of these seem broken at the top, where the thing is dented. ...you were done a favor. Walking on a similar path to before, the spider-robot walks through the same exit that it left last time.

...

Your pile of consumed rations has grown bigger, but not as big as last time. Looking around, you confirm your situation - you don't know where you are, except that it has been absolutely devastated by... something, a huge room in a large, reinforced, grown wooden building, full of dead people, desks, destroyed computer systems, cabinets (which unfortunately are pretty wrecked) and a massive table. You appear to be injured, and although it looks bad and it hurts, it seems that you are at least able to get up and move around. You don't remember being this solid the first time you... remember, but now you're moving around in a manner that you could qualify as stable and firm. Still, your head still is in serious agony, with your head and face covered in dried blood even though much of it has flaked off. Your legs appear to have been lacerated seriously, but those cuts have been healing. The area that you have been staying in is the area you woke up in, around pieces of wreckage - the shattered pieces of a computer, providing plenty of wood, plasticresin, and shredded pieces of wire and silicon. Additionally, you have what looks like it was a handheld laser pistol, with metal "barrel", electronic system of its own, a possibly-damaged battery, and roots that seem like they have some sort of magic involved with them. You feel like you know what to do, even though you don't KNOW what to do.

That spider thing is going to come back again, and you can't just come up and down in here forever, hoping not to run into it. Something needs to be done if you're going to be the one to survive. An instinct, deep within you, tells you that the thing to be done is destroying the damn thing - and that the way to destroy it is to create.


DECISION PHASE (In this phase, you must vote for what kind of action our intrepid protagonist will be taking next! (This means that's all I expect from the votebox this phase, the action for next phase.) This sends the game into a phase for the appropriate action, where I will ask for input from you on how our protagonist will proceed in performing that action - for each individual action, I'll briefly outline exactly what that consists of as I introduce the action, and place them into the rules, so this shouldn't be too tough. Each action takes something called Time Units - and in the context of Decision Phases, that basically means the time until the enemy tracks you down and you're forced into full-on battle!)

a. Design (2 Time Units) (Use the salvage or equipment that you already have available to design a piece of equipment. Conceptualize what you can do here as the protagonist spending several hours and serious effort putting something together. You can assume that they're reasonably capable, but can't make things happen out of nowhere.
b. Not Yet Available (...?)
c. Salvage (1 Time Unit) Scour your immediate area for potential salvage, and then spend a little bit of time breaking it down particular pieces of it in ways that you hope are useful. If you pick this item, in the ensuing phase I'll give a more in-depth description of potential salvage in the area, and ask you for list of things to focus on salvaging, and what you hope to break them down into (or how you plan to break them down) - this process is just a couple of hours. I will roll for the results of the Salvage phase - the more you demand, the higher your difficulty, working much like designs.
d. Not Yet Available (...?)
e. Not Yet Available (...?)
f. Not Yet Available (...?)
g. Not Yet Available (...?)


Time Units Until Enemy Returns: 4-6

Spoiler: Status (click to show/hide)

You
Physical Status: Head Hurts Incredibly, Head Had Some Sort of Bleeding Wound, Healing Leg Lacerations, Healing Leg Bruises
Mental Status: Confused, Fatigued, In Pain
Equipped: Unknown Uniform, Druid-Engineer Toolset

Spoiler: Current Equipment (click to show/hide)

Unknown Uniform: You don't quite know what this uniform is, but it mostly seems like an okay thing to be wearing - the green, brown, and orange color scheme seems to clash a bit, but somebody probably tried very hard to make it tasteful. It's a rugged outfit, and you can feel there's a low-level enchantment in here - a bit of examination revealed that this uniform does protect to a degree against biological and chemical agents, aside from being tough... for clothing, anyway, it isn't even slightly armor. There is a problem, though - it's bloodied, and problematically gashed up around the legs - one of the pockets appears to actually have been wholly destroyed.
Druid-Engineer Toolset: It took an embarrassing amount of time to realize that this was around. It is a toolbox containing a set of tools for engineering and druid-work. Although it took you a while to be able to identify these, when you actually picked them up you handled the tools with what seemed like serious familiarity. In here are a few tools like screwdrivers and wrenches and a small hammer, but also magical tools, like a tool for identifying enchantments and a tool for shaping and stimulating the growth of wood.

Spoiler: Available Salvage (click to show/hide)

Shattered Computer Wreckage (contains, for instance, wood, plasticresin, electronics)
Broken Hand Laser (You don't fully know what the plans are for this thing, but you can tell that it contains an electronic core, roots enchanted to transform electricity into light, a metallic barrel-like device at the front end, and what is probably a battery.)

[frostgiant]

Salvage (1): Frostgiant

[Stirk]

A) Design

Firestarter

For some reason the people of this strange world seem to have a wood fetish. By taking the battery out of the laser pistol and placing wires connecting either side to the barrel, we cause the barrel to heat up significantly. Depending on the power of the battery it should be capable of easily starting fires by bringing the heated barrel near anything flammable - and if we're especially lucky it will get hot enough to melt whatever the spider thing is made if just in case one ends up being hostile.

Assuming the wrappers have some thermal protection properties, they'll be added to a heat guard along with some of the clothing off the dead guys. They probably have the same protection added to their uniforms. We can take extra time to get this if needed. The heat guard is basically an umbrella that keeps the heat coil from setting us on fire.

The first thing to do in a weird situation is get a gun. This will have to do for now.

[m1895]

Salvage (2): Frostgiant, m1895

[Glass]

Salvage (3): Frostgiant, m1895, Glass
Design [Firestarter] (1): Stirk

[Powder Miner]

Remember, it's just the decision phase vote for now, so if you're voting for the design phase I do expect just the vote for the action itself rather than any specific designs - it's a little dry, but it's necessary to make sure that if we do do a design phase, everybody gets a chance.

[Stirk]

Remember, it's just the decision phase vote for now, so if you're voting for the design phase I do expect just the vote for the action itself rather than any specific designs - it's a little dry, but it's necessary to make sure that if we do do a design phase, everybody gets a chance.

Fine :V

Salvage (3): Frostgiant, m1895, Glass
Design (1): Stirk

[Madman198237]

Salvage (4): Frostgiant, m1895, Glass, Madman
Design (1): Stirk

[Man of Paper]

Salvage (5): Frostgiant, m1895, Glass, Madman, MoP
Design (1): Stirk

Might as well loot since our injuries aren't going to dramatically impact pilfering.

[King Zultan]

Salvage (6): Frostgiant, m1895, Glass, Madman, MoP, King Zultan
Design (1): Stirk

[Secretdorf]

Salvage (7): Frostgiant, m1895, Glass, Madman, MoP, King Zultan, Secretdorf
Design (1): Stirk

[chubby2man]

Salvage (: Frostgiant, m1895, Glass, Madman, MoP, King Zultan, Secretdorf, C2M
Design (1): Stirk