Topic: Deviation-22. The End of All Things. (Read 538731 times)

Powder Miner · « **Reply #7260 on:** August 16, 2012, 03:45:01 pm »

James attempted to finish off the trooper with a point-blank pistol shot to the head.

((By the way, I do have a plan, I'm not just caught up in the combat here and forgetting I'm dreaming

))

Draignean · « **Reply #7261 on:** August 16, 2012, 05:54:58 pm »

James Evan

Quote from: Powder Miner on August 16, 2012, 03:45:01 pm

James attempted to finish off the trooper with a point-blank pistol shot to the head.

Spoiler: Initiative (click to show/hide)

The trooper [Will 5] plants his feet and raises his pistol, making one last desperate effort to stop you. [Quickshot 3+1] It's a good shot, considering the man is probably dying, and it tears another impermanent (but incredibly painful) rent across your side. (Dreamspace hp -20) The wound seals back together almost instantly, and you're once again thankful that you aren't as bound by the rules of flesh and blood as these figments are.

You fire your own pistol for what you hope to be a final time, barely deviating from your last position. [Quickshot 4+1-2] The bullet strikes an inch to the left of your last shot, whipping the Technocrat's head back. (20x2=40 damage. Armor -3, Hp -37. Target killed.) He staggers back a step, then crumples.

The thug in the security station attempts to get his wounded legs under him, [End 2] but he fails, crying out in pain as the damaged limbs refuse to function properly. He slumps back to the floor, moaning in pain. With little left to do, he draws his pistol and flicks the safety off.

She pushes herself up off the floor, glaring at the now deceased Technocrat, then at you. "You couldn't have started shooting him in the head a little earlier?" Her tone is accusatory, but also very faintly relieved.

---

Spoiler: James Evan (click to show/hide)

SeriousConcentrate · « **Reply #7262 on:** August 16, 2012, 06:03:19 pm »

"Hey, boss? There's also a maintenance hatch back that way," Dom whispered, pointing at it. She was used to going through them for various jobs back in her manual labor days, and she wanted him to know it was an option if this plan didn't work out. Her duty done, she readied her assault rifle and took up position near Tarran, ready to open fire on his command.

Draignean · « **Reply #7263 on:** August 16, 2012, 06:49:46 pm »

Tarran Smith

Quote from: Tarran on August 16, 2012, 02:58:38 pm

"Dom, get ready." Tarran whispered, readying his Jormungandr and kneeling.

"Come on out, put your hands in the air. We will shoot at any sign of hostility, so don't even try it!" Tarran said calmly and firmly... as he started shuffling backwards slightly.

You kneel down and train your rifle on the destroyed door. You don't know what it is, but you're taking no chances with it. "Come on out, put your hands in the air. We will shoot at any sign of hostility, so don't even try it!" You half-shout into the darkness, attempting to make your voice calm but firm.
[Diplomacy 3] You don't sound entirely convincing, but you still think it's good enough to make any sane person at least consider giving up. Whatever is moving, however, disagrees. The repetitive movement continues unabated, not stopping or even slowing down to listen to you.

(You'll automatically be aimed in on the first thing that comes through the door.)

---

Dominique Wakeman

Quote from: SeriousConcentrate on August 16, 2012, 06:03:19 pm

"Hey, boss? There's also a maintenance hatch back that way," Dom whispered, pointing at it. She was used to going through them for various jobs back in her manual labor days, and she wanted him to know it was an option if this plan didn't work out. Her duty done, she readied her assault rifle and took up position near Tarran, ready to open fire on his command.

"Hey, boss? There's also a maintenance hatch back that way," you whisper to Tarran, tapping his shoulder and pointing back at the concealed entrance after he's finished delivering his ultimatum to the darkness. He nods once, but doesn't take his eyes from his rifle's sight. Backup exits are something that you have a justified to desire to keep handy, and Tarran doesn't have the years of hard-earned experience necessary to spot the hatches without looking for them.
With Tarran informed, you take up a standing position behind him, pointing your own rifle into the gaping maw of the obliterated door. Even after Tarran's warning, nothing changes, the rummaging movement doesn't even pause.

(You'll automatically be aimed in on the first thing that comes through the door.)

---

Spoiler: Tarran Smith (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Dominique Wakeman (click to show/hide)

Tarran · « **Reply #7264 on:** August 16, 2012, 06:54:53 pm »

"This is your last chance! Three seconds, or we'll be coming for you! And we're not afraid to shoot, jackass!" Tarran said decisively.

SeriousConcentrate · « **Reply #7265 on:** August 16, 2012, 07:04:20 pm »

"And we both have assault rifles, and we know how to use them!" Dom added.

Powder Miner · « **Reply #7266 on:** August 16, 2012, 07:44:39 pm »

"Now this is where I see what happens when I go into some branch of the prison I hadn't gone before in the dream." James walks, pistol ready, to the room where the thug and trooper -were- and then looks for a door he hadn't been before and takes it.

Draignean · « **Reply #7267 on:** August 16, 2012, 10:22:47 pm »

Tarran Smith

Quote from: Tarran on August 16, 2012, 06:54:53 pm

"This is your last chance! Three seconds, or we'll be coming for you! And we're not afraid to shoot, jackass!" Tarran said decisively.

Whatever is in there is either completely unflappable, or really, really, stupid. "This is your last chance! Three seconds, or we'll be coming for you! And we're not afraid to shoot, jackass!" [intimidate 3] Again, nothing happens. You'll admit that you're a little tired right now, and your challenges are a little flat because of it, but this is getting insulting. The immortals at least paid attention to you when you yelled at them.
Dominique tries to help your slightly anemic challenge, but the thing in the darkness continues to ignore you. Three seconds pass, then five, then ten. Time seems to be making it abundantly clear that it isn't coming out to meet you with its hands up, whatever it is.

---

Dominique Wakeman

Quote from: SeriousConcentrate on August 16, 2012, 07:04:20 pm

"And we both have assault rifles, and we know how to use them!" Dom added.

Tarran issues one last challenge to the gaping door, but again, there is no response. "And we both have assault rifles, and we know how to use them!" You add, hoping to strengthen Tarran's challenge. [intimidate 3] The pause between his warning and your addition is a little too long though, and it ends up sounding awkward and stilted.
[intuition 3] It's possible that, whatever this thing is, it just isn't afraid of you. It's also possible that it's like that door Tarran called everyone in to investigate earlier, seemingly threatening but utterly harmless. There's a lot of room for error between those two extremes.
Regardless, its three seconds are up and then some.

---

James Evan

Quote from: Powder Miner on August 16, 2012, 07:44:39 pm

"Now this is where I see what happens when I go into some branch of the prison I hadn't gone before in the dream." James walks, pistol ready, to the room where the thug and trooper -were- and then looks for a door he hadn't been before and takes it.

Blight grabs the trooper's jammed rifle off the floor, [luck 4] clearing the jammed round out of the breach and blowing out the barrel. When she's done, the two of leave the dead trooper and the unformed thing behind, heading back up to the security station. You keep your weapons out and ready as you move. That thug you shot wasn't dead when you last saw him, and you aren't in the mood to be shot anymore.
You motion Blight to stay behind you for a moment when you get back to the door. It's still partially open, [observation 3+1] and, if you listen closely, you can hear the faint rasp of labored breathing.
You take a deep breath and step through the door, [Intuition 5 Vs Thug dex 1-1 (bonus negated)] shooting blind into the corner of the room with the clearest view of the door before your body even crosses the threshold. [James Quickshot 4] (Thug -20 Hp. Target Killed) The bullet hits the sprawled out thug low in the chest, just below where the breastbone ends. The man jerks and gurgles in surprise, involuntarily putting a round in the floor as his own pistol desperately tries to rise up to shoot you. He tries for a few more seconds, the lies still.
"Nice shot," She remarks simply when She follows you in, glancing at the dead Technocrat in the corner. "Any plan that goes with it? Besides rampant slaughter- not that rampant slaughter isn't a fun plan."
"Now this is where I see what happens when I go into some branch of the prison I hadn't gone before in the dream," you say, walking slowly to the door at the far and of the station and clamping your hands around the cool handle. This is as far as you've ever been, and hopefully, it's almost as far as you need to be.
She covers you with the liberated rifle as you open the door, making sure that nothing jumps out and says boo. [luck 6] She needn't have bothered.
The door leads out into ankle high water, dazzlingly bright in the light of the tropical sun that streams down from above. Tiny waves lap at the edges of the door, disappearing into vapor as they cross the edge. Just a couple dozen yards away from the door is a beach, pristine except for a few artistically placed shells and a young, apparently topless, waitress who seems to be waiting on a single table placed right in the middle of the beach. The table is empty of people, but a square object only a little bigger than your clenched fist rests on its top. [Observation 3] It's too far away for you to make out exactly what it is.
"Shit," Blight breathes. The muzzle of her rifle drops as she leans forward, staring open-mouthed into the tropical paradise. "This is yours?" Her voice is tinged with something close to awe.
[Intuiton 5+1] "No," you say with utter certainty. "This isn't mine." You've seen places like this, sure. Holos that advertised sunlit resorts with a preserved ecosystem and enough radiation shielding that you could get a tan without crisping, but you've never actually been to one. Not enough to get this level of detail. This isn't your memory, but you can bet who it belongs to. It fit the man, sitting on a beach, sipping something fragrant and cool while he methodically tortured you for no better reason than his own amusement.
This is your torturer's paradise.

---

Spoiler: Tarran Smith (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Dominique Wakeman (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: James Evan (click to show/hide)

Powder Miner · « **Reply #7268 on:** August 16, 2012, 11:49:57 pm »

"This... probably belongs to... him. My torturer. ...and if there's any place I'm going to get clues about what's going on, it's here." James walked up and tried to make out what the square object was.

Tarran · « **Reply #7269 on:** August 17, 2012, 12:05:46 am »

You know... I'm starting t have the suspicion that we're talking to a non-living, deaf, or braindead thing. And as a result the 3s are fixed, not rolled. Hmm...

"I really wish I had a flashlight right about now..." Tarran whispered to himself. ((I really do.))

Charge in, finger on the trigger. Shoot immediately if the creature makes any sudden moves that could be reaching for a weapon or charging. "GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!"

SeriousConcentrate · « **Reply #7270 on:** August 17, 2012, 01:05:53 am »

Dom followed Tarran in, ready to start firing the second he did, while making sure she stayed to his right to prevent any friendly fire incidents.

Draignean · « **Reply #7271 on:** August 17, 2012, 08:41:33 am »

Quote

You know... I'm starting t have the suspicion that we're talking to a non-living, deaf, or braindead thing. And as a result the 3s are fixed, not rolled. Hmm...

Those threes are all rolled, it's really actually quite impressive. James has been getting uniformly great rolls for the last few, and you've been getting pretty mediocre rolls.

I've been re-reading this RTD, largely so I can add all the NPCs you've come across to the wiki, but I've also been taking inspiration from some of my earlier work. Granted, that work was even more grammatically incorrect than the recent work, and it lacked the clarity of mud, but it did get turns out much more rapidly.
So, as you may have noticed, I've been experimenting with going back to the old style- breaking you up into your timelocks and then rolling for your actions as they come up.

I'll still have to even it out somehow, otherwise Tarran and Dom will be moving at three or four times the speed of Ash, but for now it seems to be working. You can tell me what you think of it as soon as there is a enough of a sample to be meaningful.

Anyway, turns ahoy.

SeriousConcentrate · « **Reply #7272 on:** August 17, 2012, 08:56:12 am »

(Lampshade it: wolfchild, since he's posting slower, is simply in a Mass Effect 1 elevator.

Anyway, you know me... the more turns of this I can get the better.

)

Draignean · « **Reply #7273 on:** August 17, 2012, 10:15:45 am »

Tarran Smith

Quote from: Tarran on August 17, 2012, 12:05:46 am

Charge in, finger on the trigger. Shoot immediately if the creature makes any sudden moves that could be reaching for a weapon or charging. "GET DOWN ON THE GROUND!"

Lacking another reasonable option, you decide to go with with a more unreasonable option: Charge in, shoot anything that moves, then maybe look around a little and see if there's anything else you need to threaten.
[Dex 4] You dash forwards, shouting for anything ahead to get its ass on the ground. You clear the blasted door with a small jump, landing a scant few feet away from the source of the irritatingly unresponsive movement.
It's a small cleaning bot, the kind used in restaurants, nice bars, and nicer households. They're designed cleaned up spilled drink, pick up broken glass, filter out the shed skin and hair, and generally help with light cleaning. This particular model's dashing paintjob is chipped, and it seems to move a little sluggishly, but the sluggishness can probably be attributed to its continued attempts to move a corpse bigger than it is. You point your assault rifle at it. It seems to look at you quizzically, then it cleans off one of your boots and goes back to attempting to sweep a human corpse onto a five inch dustpan. You sincerely doubt that the little bot poses a threat.
[observation 2] The room you're in is big, not as big as the gardens, but big enough that you have more than a little trouble seeing the edges of it. What you can see seems to be a cross between WWIII and a five-star restaurant. Tables and chairs have been arranged into rudimentary barricades, but unlike the disused barricades you saw in Mavaren gardens, these have been riddled with small arms fire and slag. Grinning corpses peak out from behind tables and chairs, curled into the fetal position. Others are sprawled out on their fronts, gunned down in the act of running.
You don't know what happened here, but it was a hell of a fight. [Intuition 5] Or, considering that you can't see a single firearm by any of the corpses, this was a massacre.

---

Dominique Wakeman

Quote from: SeriousConcentrate on August 17, 2012, 01:05:53 am

Dom followed Tarran in, ready to start firing the second he did, while making sure she stayed to his right to prevent any friendly fire incidents.

[Dex 4+1] You easily keep pace with Tarran as he charges, you could probably outdistance him, but instead you keep left of him and a stride behind. Tarran, despite his other qualities, is not the kind of person you want to stand in front of while he has a weapon in his hands.
Tarran barges through the shattered entrance, immediately sweeping right and pointing his gun at the target of his earlier threats. The cleaning bot seems unfazed, taking the time to clean a bit of blood off Tarran's boot before returning to a hopeless attempt at removing a dead body with a miniature broom. [Mechnical 5] The bot has obviously been damaged, you've never worked with this variant before, (Tiny brooms, civilian grade air filters, and stain scrubbing gear is about as much use as spitting in a chemical fire down in maintenance.) but you can recognize that this one is either out of, or very low on, internal lubricants. The faintly acrid reek of hot metal and the sluggishness of its movements testifies to that.
[Observation 1] Your vision seems to be having trouble adapting to the environment. The ceiling of the room is invisible to you, and anything more than twenty or so feet away is, at best, flickering and ethereal. The effect is disorienting and vaguely nauseating.

---

James Evan

Quote from: Powder Miner on August 16, 2012, 11:49:57 pm

"This... probably belongs to... him. My torturer. ...and if there's any place I'm going to get clues about what's going on, it's here." James walked up and tried to make out what the square object was.

You step out of the door, splashing down a foot into the tropical waters and soft sand of evil's own private getaway. Blight follows you slowly, doing a lot less rifle pointing and a lot more slack-jawed staring. You'll admit that the guy had a decent taste in resorts, the island might be a bit cliché, but it's still the nicest thing you've seen in a long, long time.
You concentrate on trying to figure out what the small box is while you slog up to the shore. [Observation 5] The cube becomes recognizable as soon as you're close enough to see the small dome set into the top face- a portable holographic system, the perfect tool for the bored youth or world traveler. It's a nice model, but, since nothing in here actually exists, that's not really surprising.
The topless local woman offers you a drink as soon as you manage to wade your way up onto the beach. The drink she's trying to give you is a pale pink and smells strongly of cherries, something tropical, and alcohol. You wonder whether you can get hungover in a dream.

---

(Tarran Smith is no longer tired.)

Spoiler: Tarran Smith (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Dominique Wakeman (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: James Evan (click to show/hide)

SeriousConcentrate · « **Reply #7274 on:** August 17, 2012, 10:54:15 am »

"Ugh. Poor little guy. I'd better shut him down until we can find him some oil or something," Dom said, crouching by the robot and looking for his controls. Once she found the off switch and deactivated it, she'd wait to see what Tarran wanted to do and then follow his plan.

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Author Topic: Deviation-22. The End of All Things. (Read 538731 times)

Powder Miner

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Draignean

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

SeriousConcentrate

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Draignean

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Tarran

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

SeriousConcentrate

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Powder Miner

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Draignean

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Powder Miner

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Tarran

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

SeriousConcentrate

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Draignean

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

SeriousConcentrate

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

Draignean

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.

SeriousConcentrate

Re: Deviation-22, Ch. 2 Not every piece of paper in an infested bunker is useful.