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Author Topic: BECOME THE JUGGERNAUT (AR/SG) - Decision Phase - "Mustard-Colored Dust"  (Read 7330 times)

Man of Paper

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Prepare: (1) m1895
Scout: (1) MoP

I think we should scout first, then prepare.
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Doomblade187

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I would rather scout and then prepare - that way we may find an environmental thing we can use to attack it.
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In any case it would be a battle of critical thinking and I refuse to fight an unarmed individual.
One mustn't stare into the pathos, lest one become Pathos.

Stirk

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Prepare: (1) m1895
Scout: (1) MoP
Design: (1) Stirk

We have this fight in the bag, lets get ready for the next one.
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This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

This is my waifu, this is my gun. This one's for fighting, this ones for fun.

Doomblade187

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Prepare: (1) m1895
Scout: (2) MoP, Doomblade
Design: (1) Stirk
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In any case it would be a battle of critical thinking and I refuse to fight an unarmed individual.
One mustn't stare into the pathos, lest one become Pathos.

King Zultan

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Prepare: (1) m1895
Scout: (3) MoP, Doomblade, King Zultan
Design: (1) Stirk
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The Lawyer opens a briefcase. It's full of lemons, the justice fruit only lawyers may touch.
Make sure not to step on any errant blood stains before we find our LIFE EXTINGUSHER.
but anyway, if you'll excuse me, I need to commit sebbaku.
Quote from: Leodanny
Can I have the sword when you’re done?

Rockeater

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Prepare: (1) m1895
Scout: (4) MoP, Doomblade, King Zultan, Rockeater
Design: (1) Stirk
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Damnit people, this is why I said to keep the truce. Because now everyone's ganging up on the cats.
Also, don't forget to contact your local Eldritch Being(s), so that they can help with our mission to destroy the universe.

Powder Miner

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Re: BECOME THE JUGGERNAUT (AR/SG) - Scouting Phase - "Mustard-Colored Dust"
« Reply #141 on: July 14, 2022, 11:37:16 pm »

A few minutes of thinking and fiddling around with the corners of the newly-built Lightning Gun leads to a couple of (relatively, given the constant damned headache) quick conclusions. Having the electrolaser is probably an adequate safeguard in the event of what is hopefully the worst-case scenario (running into the spider-robot by accident), so it's probably safer to be up and about, now. Being stuck inside this one part of this one building, even if it is an area with a lot to work with, is limiting in what you can build and what you can do even outside of building, so it certainly does make sense to do a little exploration. But in any event? Sure, having the massive hole in the ceiling out to the sky helps to make it a bit less drab, but with being stuck inside the same building for, as far as you could tell, days and days...

You want to see what was out there. You want to get some fresh air, or at least some different air - different sights and sounds. You let out a soft grunt as you pull yourself to your feet, the healing cuts and bruises making themselves known, and then head back down the stairs down the catwalk, and towards the external door. The handle is a push lever, which you shove yourself against, hands on your gun, pushing the door slowly open in order to peek outside... you get a sliver of light and colors, the orange-tinted blue of a sky just before sunset, grass in strikingly yellow soil, and a white concrete path leading away from the door. No spider rushing forward to disembowel you, though. That being about as good a sign as any, you push the door all the way forwards, and exit the building into the outside world.

Music for a New(?) World

Something strikes you, before you can really process all the new visual input: it was a stroke of small fortune that you came out at the time you did, considering the roaring pain hammering at the inside of your skull. The just-darkening sky isn't bright enough to overwhelm your eyes and make things more painful, but there's still enough light for you to be able to see far out - far out. Sweeping for miles and miles and miles, are that blue sky, those orangening clouds, and a ground composed of a fine, mustard-colored, dusty soil. All of the soil is that color, whether it be the loam right in front of the building where grass grows, or the fine dust stretching long away, seemingly without end, turning your world for a long moment into a tableau of yellow and blue. Stark, bringing up in you some nearly indescribable mixture of both discomfort and comfortable familiarity.

Shaking yourself off from what was building into a little bit of a stupor, you take a second look around and note the variety in the local terrain - immediately around the building, the ground is loamier, with grass just a few weeks overgrown stretching out for just enough yards in each direction to look nice. A little concrete pathway extends outwards to a road (paved with a syrup-colored material), which leads away some distance through the barrens, flanked by a margin of wilder grass. Other facilities dot the road here and there in the nearer distance, but sparsely - until a wide, dense clustering of tops of buildings over the horizon, which look to be a city. Smoke rises, there.

You trot around the building for a few minutes to get a clearer view of the other side of the road, which crosses back through barrens until it bends to the right and enters gradually loamier soil - which abruptly enters a wall of trees, getting thicker as they go in until they become a full-blown forest going far, far beyond your immediate vicinity. The transition to the forest is abrupt, and the outer reaches only barely qualify as "sparse" - yet, you note, the trees are most definitely new-growth, stretching often a couple hundred feet up but without the characteristically thick old-growth trunks. The forest is so, so much greener than anything else around, even with the grass around your building; the soil is still yellow, but speckled with brown here, and the shade and the green and brown coloration of the trees take the tinge off of it.

A dirt road continues to the left of where the road bends here, off into the barren dusty ground, on and on - but the level terrain means you can see small clusters of something built-up on the horizon here, too. This doesn't look like a city, though - these are much, much squatter, wider, and much less dense, ranging outwards in spots far away from the center. Fortifications, maybe.

As for your building itself, there's the large central room that you just left, which seems to take a pretty dominating place, but that's hardly all of the complex, with the building continuing in, as far as you can tell from the outside, hallways and probably smaller rooms that branch out from the main one, eventually leading to a series of larger rooms at the end - but instead of this all being, say, one big block of a building, you can visibly see most of its haphazard (and often blown in, now) contours out here, as if they were built onto each other individually after the fact of something. This is probably what extends from the door that was blocked - and you can see that there has actually been an opening torn into the nearby hallway, where a piece of the wall has been ripped inwards. Curiously, though, the edges of this aren't jagged, but instead mostly smooth, with some pieces of wood extending in strange, long torn shapes, like taffy pulled and rotated until it tore away.

This is a lot - but there are a few options that are clearly relevant to your situation either short-term or long-term.

What would you like to do with your scouting? Choose two:
Spy on the Spider: That robot-spider seemed like it was on a patrol path, and you can probably figure out what that is and catch some long-term viewing of the thing from a safe distance with a bit of caution and a bit of patience. This will give you more information on the enemy.
Explore the Rest of the Complex: There's a lot more to the building you're in than what you've been seeing this whole time; someone or something else even got you in to at least one of the blocked sections already. There will only be so much detail here, as you aren't spending hours, but you'll learn about the general contents of the building.
Map Your Outer Surroundings: You've just been exposed to a wide world, familiar and unfamiliar all at once, wonderful and... maybe not so much. You've got the time to go back in, grab paper and writing materials, and make a rough map of what you can see from here, getting a better eye for the distances involved in the process.
Explore Outside In Detail (1 Time Unit, choose City Road, Barrens, or Forest as a subvote): There's a lot to see out here - and you could start down towards one of the roads away from this building. Even if you probably aren't going to be walking all the way to the city in the distance, for example, you could explore the other facilities on the road and get a closer look at the city, get a closer look at the fortifications out in the barrens, or even enter and explore the forest some.


Time Units until Enemy Returns: 1
Spoiler: Status (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Current Equipment (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: July 14, 2022, 11:40:03 pm by Powder Miner »
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Man of Paper

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Quote from: Choose Two? Don't Mind If I DoBox
Explore the rest of the complex: (1) MoP
Spy on the Spider: (1) MoP

Reasoning: knowledge is power, knowing is half the battle, the more you know.

But also we were put in the complex for some reason or another, and investigating the complex could help us figure out why/how/who, while spying on the spider could give us more deets on what the spider's purpose is and who it's working for.
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Stirk

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Quote from: Choose Two? Don't Mind If I Dox
Explore the rest of the complex: (2) MoP, Stirk
Spy on the Spider: (1) MoP
Explore the Barrens: (1) Stirk

I just wanna make more guns and those places are the most likely to have stuff to make guns with.
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This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

This is my waifu, this is my gun. This one's for fighting, this ones for fun.

m1895

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Quote from: Choose Two? Don't Mind If I Dox
Explore the rest of the complex: (3) MoP, Stirk, m1895
Spy on the Spider: (2) MoP,  m1895
Explore the Barrens: (1) Stirk
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Glass

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Quote from: Choose Two? Don't Mind If I Dox
Explore the rest of the complex: (4) MoP, Stirk, m1895, Glass
Spy on the Spider: (3) MoP,  m1895, Glass
Explore the Barrens: (1) Stirk
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Quote from: FallacyOfUrist (on Discord, 11/15/21)
Glass is, as usual, correct.
Yep, as ever, I bestow upon Glass the expected +1
I'm gonna say we go with whatever Glass's idea is.

King Zultan

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Quote from: Choose Two? Don't Mind If I Dox
Explore the rest of the complex: (5) MoP, Stirk, m1895, Glass, King Zultan
Spy on the Spider: (4) MoP,  m1895, Glass, King Zultan
Explore the Barrens: (1) Stirk
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The Lawyer opens a briefcase. It's full of lemons, the justice fruit only lawyers may touch.
Make sure not to step on any errant blood stains before we find our LIFE EXTINGUSHER.
but anyway, if you'll excuse me, I need to commit sebbaku.
Quote from: Leodanny
Can I have the sword when you’re done?

Powder Miner

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Re: BECOME THE JUGGERNAUT (AR/SG) - Decision Phase - "Mustard-Colored Dust"
« Reply #147 on: July 17, 2022, 12:53:49 pm »

Well, first things first - you definitely want to get into the rest of the facility and explore, there's no ambiguity about that, but you need to make sure that the damn spider isn't going to waltz around some corner and stick a horrible spindly leg right through your abdomen. You make another circuit around the facility, listening carefully with ear to wall, but you don't hear any whirring, or clicking of metallic legs against wood. You don't remember the robot being incredibly loud, sure, but you also get the distinct feeling that the walls here are thin enough that you'd be able to hear it anyway if it were inside, so it probably isn't. But you need to know for sure where it is, since you'll probably spend an hour or two in there, and even with your weapon being ambushed at close range would be very bad.

How to check... it was deliberately finding and killing survivors, you watched the tail end of that happen yourself when you were losing time, but despite your being around for several days and more than one round of its patrol, it never seemed to find you. You... don't really think that there's something special about you that prevented that, you think your body is pretty normal aside from all of the fucking wounds (they really do hurt). So when it comes down to other factors... well, you were higher than it, and you remember it was damaged - maybe it can't sense things higher in altitude than it? The roof would be the best place to spot for it from then. Continuing your circle around the facility about a third over again, you find a spot in the crumbled walls where the rubble piles up and provides you access to some rather grippably holed section of wall nearer to the roof. Carefully, grunting, slowly making sure that the pain in your legs and your head don't drop you down, you make your way up to the roof - the room you were in had a massive hole in it, and there are definitely holes elsewhere, but there are plenty of sections of roof that seem still solid enough... the miracle of reinforcement magic, probably.

Actually, one of those sections contains two of those turrets connected to one of the catwalk computers in the main room (maybe to all of them, before they got smashed) - you had considered getting up here earlier, but it looks like you've found an opportunity to do so, even if you have to be careful. The two turrets, relatively compact deals but most certainly larger than man-sized, are in... vastly different shape. One of them is utterly, violently destroyed, huge chunks of wood and electronics scattered over its corner of the facility's roof, but it looks like the other turret is relatively intact, with a charred, soot-covered hole in its corner, but, well... it's still in one piece, which is more than its counterpart can say.

You aren't up here to look at the turrets, though, and you start perching at various close-by edges of the roof, looking around to see if you can spot it somewhere - and you nearly miss it at first, but you do. Down the road towards the city, the spider makes its way out of the door of the nearest facility, and begins moving over this way again at an ambling pace - slow enough that you'll definitely have time to explore the rest of the facility before it makes it over. Great! You climb back down, with another series of groans, and make your way through the entrance literally torn out of the hallway connected to the room you woke up in.

Wandering the facility for several minutes reveals that multiple of the hallways are essentially office complexes - extrapolating from the number of people you saw on the ground earlier, it seems like it was pretty likely that everybody here got their own office, although there are more offices than there were corpses. Stepping into these rooms for a moment, you find that they seem to be... uneven in their contents. Some of the offices are much emptier than others, with ashes on the ground or just plain missing all but a couple of loosely scattered papers. But this isn't all of the offices, especially those blocked by rubble - you can see that some of these offices are actually pretty much still replete with all of their paperwork! Also, the chairs look nice.

Going further into the facility, you come to an area that suddenly seems to be made out of much more metal than it is wood - this part of the complex must have been terribly expensive to build. It seems largely to consist of two parts - one part is a room scattered around with tools, some of which are larger and more complex than the ones you have on you, as well as half-constructed, old and damaged, or half-deconstructed pieces of equipment and various materials; this must be some sort of maintenance or assembly room. Moving beyond into a set of two large, connected rooms, the metal making up the inner walls and the floor here gets thicker, as you enter what appears to be some sort of firing range, with targets made of wood, steel, and... ah, shit, what is it... that's familiar... ballistic gel. A few pieces of equipment, some bolted down and one or two half-unbolted, dot the stands - but you don't have the time to look at them in detail, because you feel like you've spent long enough in here that you need to attend to the matter of the spider. You find an external door near the spot you climbed up last time  - and though it's stuck half-shut, a couple of minutes with your wood-shaper and a crowbar fix that problem.

After struggling to get back up for a few minutes (and catching your breath... all of this exertion isn't fantastic for that constant pain, though in fairness very little is), you peek back down over the roof - and your breath freezes in your throat for a moment, because the spider is right down there, within a couple hundred yards of the building. But being up here seems to be working for shielding you from its view, because it doesn't react to your presence at all, waltzing instead in the direction of the ranges and towards the external door there on a steady, unchanging path. Taking the given advantage, you keep your gaze locked onto the thing the whole time it passes through.

First off, getting the longer look at it confirms that it very much is some sort of mechanical object, made out of metal, glass, and plastics - but mostly the metal, as a matter of fact. You don't see any sort of ranged weaponry or countermeasures on it whatsoever - as a matter of fact, the only real weapons on it are the four long, jointed, spindly and legs it walks on - actually, those legs are long, and when it's moving in the dirt outside, it leaves furrows with the strength of its locomotion as it walks. You suspect that, even though it's been moving at a sedate pace, the strength and length of those simply-articulated legs probably mean that it is very capable of moving much faster than it is currently doing, and maybe climbing - you don't know how agile it is. The legs are of course at least somewhat sharp, too, and still bloodied from when it was probably creating some of the corpses in there.

Still, it doesn't look very tough - the central orb, to which the legs connect, which appears to make up the whole "body" of the thing, is dented mightily up top, and you saw that that was done with human strength (maybe even weak human strength) and a piece of solidly reinforced wood - it's very much hollow, or at least mostly so, for sure. There are an array of sensors on there, the ones at top cracked or shattered or otherwise destroyed by the blow that dented it - you recognize some of these sensors despite their strange construction, such as cameras and microphones, but you don't know what several of the others are. You also note an antenna on the thing - is it transmitting information? Receiving it? Both? Finally, its behavior seems extraordinarily regular, and you've never seen any sort of action from it that speaks to clear intelligence rather than rote reaction - you don't think it is some sort of strange, wildly sci-fi artificially intelligent computer entity, but rather some sort of pre-programmed, self-operating drone.


DECISION PHASE

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. Revision (1-2 Time Units) Use the salvage or equipment that you already have available to revise a piece of pieces of equipment. Revisions are much easier pieces of work that take less time and fewer components (either edits to existing work, or particularly simple new pieces of work). 1 Time Unit is worth one revision, 2 Time Units is worth two, but a reroll of any roll of 2.
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. Scout (1 Time Unit) Search outside of your immediate are for information on your wider environment. You will be presented with three things to gain information on (one of which will always be the option to spy on and gain more information on your enemy) and will get to choose two, or write in another priority. There could be some risk involved here - in the worst possible case, you could lose extra Time Units. However, there is no dice-based risk.
e. Prepare (1 Time Unit) Set up the space that you are currently in and/or the objects on your person in order to shape the imminent battlefield in your favor. Although you will vote on a preferred preparation plan here, there won't be any dice rolls and you can generally expect success unless you do something very risky (which could take more time, have side effects, or most rarely fail). This isn't the same thing as preparing your tactics for the battle.
f. Leave (1-? Time Units) Get out of the current area (the facility) and go somewhere else - this takes 1 Time Unit at minimum, but when trying to avoid contact with an enemy or travel particularly large distances, it can require more Time Units in order to succeed.
g. Not Yet Available (...?)


Time Units until Enemy Returns: 1
Spoiler: Status (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Current Equipment (click to show/hide)
Spoiler: Current Enemy (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: July 17, 2022, 01:09:33 pm by Powder Miner »
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Stirk

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Re: BECOME THE JUGGERNAUT (AR/SG) - Decision Phase - "Mustard-Colored Dust"
« Reply #148 on: July 17, 2022, 03:41:12 pm »

So it can’t see us, can’t attack us at range if it can see us, and we can probably just club it to death with our gun if we screw up to the point it gets into melee range.

We could have gotten an armor design in :-/

Let’s salvage the turrets I guess?
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This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

This is my waifu, this is my gun. This one's for fighting, this ones for fun.

Man of Paper

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Re: BECOME THE JUGGERNAUT (AR/SG) - Decision Phase - "Mustard-Colored Dust"
« Reply #149 on: July 17, 2022, 04:35:57 pm »

Prepare an elevated, concealed firing position using various debris to create cover.

Even if the thing can’t see us above it, I’m thinking if we take it out we might want to wait around for a little bit to see if some sort of QRF shows up to deal with an unknown armed opponent. If it’s transmitting to someone or something then they might get upsetti spaghetti if we break their toy

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Prepare elevated, concealed position: (1) MoP
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