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 PHASEa. 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:
1You
Physical Status: Head Hurts Incredibly, Head Had Some Sort of Bleeding Wound, Healing Leg Lacerations, Healing Leg Bruises
Mental Status: Fatigued, In Pain
Equipped: Unknown Uniform, Druid-Engineer Toolset
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. You also have a mostly complete set of tools for performing precision electronic work.
Lightning Gun: A rather savagely powerful electrolaser rifle that you put together in the place where you woke up. The rifle, well balanced and easy to aim even with its extremely simple woodsight, has a two-stage trigger, which fires first a relatively weak laser (comparable to that of a standard druid-engineer-made laser pistol but with slightly more range), and then if held down a terrifyingly strong bolt of electricity which can destroy most all electronics, set objects on fire, and probably kill or at least severely wound organic targets. Needs two batteries, one for the laser and slotted into the center, and one for the electric shot and slotted into the rear.
Refined Salvage: Small Computer Core (This came from the central screen, probably just meant for basic briefing work or drawing on the screen using the mouse, etcetera. The computer itself is pretty much intact, but are also not especially powerful.)
Monitor Components (Screen is cracked, but pretty much everything else here is intact.)
Intact Circuit Boards (These have roles in processing, memory storage, and programming. You don't have too many of these.)
Wires (Wires made of metal with rubberresin insulation. Very fine. You have a lot, although this still isn't an overwhelming amount of actual length.)
Wireless Transmitter (Not big enough to transmit a very far distance, but could transmit to... probably anywhere within this building?)
Silicon (From destroyed electronics).
1 Set of Electricity-to-Light Roots (Root with an enchantment to convert electric energy to searing hot light.)
1 Light-to-Laser Ring. (Ring from laser guns that turns the light from them into lasers.)
Potential Salvage: Low-Quality Computer Wreckage (Wood, Plasticresin, electronic waste, maybe a couple of worthwhile pieces of electronics.)
1 Intact Computer (Like the former but completely undamaged; you could extract full parts from this, though obviously it'd stop it from working. Maybe you could also glean some more information on the "T.O.W.E.R. Defense Emplacement".)
Wooden Furniture (Table, Desks, Cabinets - consumer-grade reinforcement enchantment, but mostly they're just the most easily-accessible wood.)
Intact Hand Pistol (Toying with this for a couple of minutes reveals it to likely significantly simpler than the lasers. Although its remarkably flat, chevron-like barrel is treated wood, it actually has a metallic core, with a spot for some sort of flat tube magazine to go in the back.)
Other Toolsets (Not all of these tools are in your toolbox... maybe you could look for something to help with specific tasks.)
Bathroom Earthenware (Stoneware piping, porcelain tiles, and porcelain furniture make up this bathroom.)
Rations (Aside from rations being useful for... y'know... eating, they also make up organic material for druidcraft and have a life-preservation enchantment.)
Structural-Grade Wood (Wood heavily enchanted for particular reinforcement. The stuff making up the bulk of the walls is more lightly enchanted than the stuff making up the supports. Pieces of both types are all over the floor.)
"Spider" Drone
A self-operated drone, clearly with an in-built computer of some sort, but not intelligent insofar as you can tell - rather, its movements are regular enough to suggest pre-programmed routines. It is, strangely enough, made primarily out of metal and glass and electronics rather than wood or other plant-based materials. It is a head-shaped orb, full of sensors (sight, sound, and presumably other things you can't currently figure out) but damaged up top to the point of removing sensory input from that angle. Its weapons are its legs, four long and jointed spindles connected to the central orb - they're somewhat sharp, but the real threat is their length and strength. You suspect it could probably move very fast, and maybe even climb.
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Topic: BECOME THE JUGGERNAUT (AR/SG) - Decision Phase - "Mustard-Colored Dust" (Read 7255 times)