Roll 42 (GIGANTIC)
POI's:You can make up POI's. In fact, please do. That would take some work off me.
This list is unfinished.
In 2028, war between the Ross and the Centarui happened like usual. Both empires initially attempted to attack each other's homeworlds instead of major colonies. The Centauri government, to make things horrible for the Ross, built massive walls overlooking the Ross' major landing zone, and affixed howitzers and flak cannons atop its supports.
Seeing the wall's construction, the Ross at first ignored it, executing sieges against the city as per standard procedure.
As the wall expanded sideways, however, the Ross had to travel further and further--while taking fire--in order to move around it.
Eventually, seeing as the Centauri would eventually expand the wall to circle the entire city, the Ross gave up.
They retreated, and began attacking colonies, returning to a more traditional form of warfare.
Today, the bulwark is largely unused, but due to the massive costs involved in removing the thing, the Centauri government has simply let it stand. More recently, junkers have been attempting to cut parts of the wall off to sell as high-quality steel, as well as collecting the rusting howitzers and cannons still in place.
A
launch loop that links Empire City to an orbital network of space elevators, other launch loops, hypersonic trams, cargo drop platforms, and stations. It is
always bustling with cargo, passengers, and even ships being lowered and raised into orbit.
The structure itself has lasted nearly 850 years, having been set up by Centauri engineers 50 years after the
Centauri first landed in the ocean. One of the deflector stations, in fact, is centered around the floating remains of the colony ship.
The launch loop costs 10 credits per ride, with an additional credit for every metric ton of cargo shipped.
(Until I post a writeup on planet Centauri, I'll say here that the
Centauri carried with it a miniature city, complete with state-of-the-art recycling systems, even for the 2090's, when it was started and finished. Upon landing, the ship's engine and hull was dismantled for materials and electronics while the reactor was used to power the first settlement, built on top of the buoyant colony ship.
Centauri Prime was discovered to have little if any ocean currents due to a conveniently large moon that orbited about 1.2 times every Earth-day, eclipsing the sun every night, keeping the planet's surface shielded from the star. Centauri Prime has a very, very long day of 320 days, and a year of 340 days.
Every 14-15 years or so, the planet's lit side becomes its dark side, freezing everything and forcing wildlife to migrate. Centauri cities are usually fitted with artificial heating to protect themselves, or simply built on top of large geothermal vents, like Empire City).
Empire Launch Station has a deflector setup underneath the city plaza. The ring is not very well protected, because it is firstly unknown to most citizens, and secondly there are two main entrances, both of which are locked down unless maintenance is required.
Technically not part of the city, but nonetheless important, the massive lava pit near the city radiates heat which protects the general area from freezing over during a 'dark decade.'
The Empire City Emergency Lava Pit Sealing system consists of a massive tungsten door, powered by massive servos. When activated, it can seal the lava pit in case of volcanic activity. Attempts have actually been made to sabotage the system in the Ross-Centauri war of 2928, but those attempts have since been repaired after a short period of civil panic over the possibility of an eruption.
The lava pit has been stable since its discovery. Owing to the planet's lack of rotation, scientists have guessed that because the planet lacks strong magma currents, no eruptions should occur in the near future.
Surrounded by a high wall, the pit is a common tourist attraction during the 'light decades.' However, during 'dark decades,' the top of the pit cools over.
The pit's industrial use is obviously power. The massive amount of heat in the lava allows factories to pump it from the pit's surface and use it for local power generation. A lava distribution system exists and is run by the Centauri Civil Works Institute, both pumping and distributing lava to nearby factories in order to reduce power costs.
Located in "The Drop Crater"--a crater formed through centuries of cargo drops--Alpha Drop Zone features a nearby recovery and repackaging station designed to retrieve cargo dropped from orbit. The cargo drop process is quite simple, really. You drop cargo off at an orbital drop station, paying 3 credits per disposable shock-absorbing crate, and it is subsequently dropped from orbit. This system has been around for ages, quite literally, and still works today as a simple method of transporting cargo via gravity.
'Poor' in today's terms doesn't quite mean what it did in the modern era. Food is so cheap now that rarely will people lack the money to buy food. Simply due to the massive demand for food, agriculture organizations can provide basic food for free, even.
Luxury food, of course, remains out of reach from the poor. So do many forms of electronics.
However, the residents of Spark District are not useless, unemployed beggars. They often work in scrap fields, ship repair shops, gun stores and ranges, and in some cases, they operate with the black market.
The reactor is essentially what powers the city. It is a huge, massive, colossal, gigantic cylindrical structure measuring two kilometers in height and roughly four hundred in width. At its base is a joint-uranium mine and nuclear lab. While miners toil away mining pitchblende, geothermal power is used to smelt the ore and extract the uranium, then turn it into plutonium by feeding into the reactor's first breeding stage, which is used to power the next stage.
The next stage is a massive fission core. While fusion remains far more efficient than fission, the city's near boundless uranium deposits make it far cheaper to simply use fission for power rather than fusion. The reactor was completed two decades ago and has proven to be a far, far superior source of power than the previously used geothermal vents, which have now been utilized solely for magma powered factories.
stepped out of the coffee shop, taking a breath of freezing, polluted Centauri air. He had never actually been planetside before, so for him, Centauri Prime was a completely new experience for him.
Centauri Prime was approximately three hundred kilometers away from Alpha Centauri--this meant that the planet would normally be unbearably cold. But the planet's slow rotation, as he had learned, meant that there was sun for most of the day, barring a daily eclipse blotting out one of the suns, lasting a few hours each time.
Despite the seemingly inhospitable environment, the planet appeared to support a few species of decorative trees. Whether much native life existed here was unknown to him.
Varron walked down the avenue to the city's plaza. The plaza itself was a massive circular clearing in the midst of the city. To his left, he saw plumes of black smoke rising from the factories. To his right, he saw cloudless yellow skies. He knew there was a desert to the west, but he wanted to get a closer look. At the same time, he knew he wasn't here for sightseeing, he was here on a mission. With a tenuous ceasefire being the only thing holding the two nations from once again trying to exterminate each other, the last thing to do was look at pretty deserts.
[6] Varron looked around, asking for directions. The city was densely populated--people, especially short people, walked in every direction. In English he asked a nearby couple for directions and, upon receiving them, hailed for a taxi craft.
The mounted cameras scanning the streets immediately picked up his gesture and routed a taxi craft to stop by on the circular road surrounding the plaza. The sleek magnetic car floated along and stopped for Varron to get in.
"Automated taxis, hmm."As the doors shut automatically, the taxi's screen prompted Varron for a destination.
Oh great, I don't know any addresses--oh wait, there's a map.He reached for the map display, tapped the search bar, and said out loud,
"Library." The screen displayed a list of three local libraries. He tapped the one labelled "Empire Library of the Natural Sciences."
The taxi started to accelerate. Meanwhile, Varron got out his communicator to keep track of his friends. Upon doing so, he noticed a little flashing icon in the top left corner. Tapping it, Varron managed to bring up the messenger app, which presented him with the following:
Welcome to Empire city! Attached is a map of the premises:
*snip*
Oh, well that's convenient...Varron got out of the taxi in front of the Empire Library of the Natural Sciences. The first thing he noticed was the large steel tower reaching toward the sky as part of the library. Now he had a chance to look at that desert...
Taking the glass-paned elevator, he located the 'Arcane' section and memorized its position so that he could come back to it.
The elevator slid along, humming as it went. Varron heard the sound of creaking gears as it stopped, and the doors hissed open thanks to pneumatics. Varron stepped onto the translucent glass floor and stared out the window, that is, more-or-less, the wall.
For that matter, the wall was also made of translucent glass. The main distinction between what could be considered a "window" and the wall itself was that the wall had support beams running through it, and the window was bordered by a golden steel frame. Other than the steel, everything was glass.
Varron had read about the Centauri glass industry at the university. He did a report at one point, even though he only did minimal research on the process of creating high-grade Centauri glass. In layman's terms, Centauri Prime had a lot of deserts. Deserts have sand. Sand makes glass. Centauri make glass stronger. It's that simple.
With nearby volcanic activity, making glass was simpler than ever. The single largest Centauri glassworks was located here, in Empire City, in the Steam District. There they manufactured NuGlas, a special form of glass that can take almost anything kinetic without breaking--being harder than most projectiles. It also made fabulous blades--Varron had always wanted a NuGlas sword or even a dagger. But they were expensive because they were hand-crafted. A NuGlas blade is considerably more effective than a standard NanoSteel blade, but they are horribly difficult to craft, and production costs would simply be too unfeasible if they were made standard-issue.
Finished thinking about glass, Varron continued on and returned to the elevator, making his way to the 'Arcane' section of the library and grabbing the first book he could find.
A Beginner's Guide to Magic--bleh. What was I at the university for?[6] He continued searching through books, coming across one book, in particular--the title of which caught his eye.
-Preface-
The universe as we know it is governed by physical laws. These laws cannot be broken, because we conform to them no matter what. Nothing we can do can break the laws, because it is the very laws which allow us to exist in this universe.
There is one loophole, however. Over the years, studies have shown that the laws of physics can seemingly be violated to unknown maximums, indicating that there is something within these laws that allow us to break them. Some people have been born with magical capabilities. Others have gained it over the course of their lives. But one thing is clear: the more one uses magic, the more the laws of physics can simply be avoided. Entropy, Quantum Mechanics, even simple Kinematics all have no place when placed under the light of sufficiently advanced magic...
-Chapter 1: Positive Feedback-
Over the course of my studies, I have collected overwhelming evidence for the hypothesis that there is a positive feedback from magic, into magic. The thesis may be simplified into the following statement: "Where there is magic, magic abounds." Obviously this is invalid looking at it from a limited contextual view. Practitioners of "weak magic," as it is called, certainly do not "abound" in magic. But over an indefinite period of time, magic will overwhelm physics. Magic opens the gate through physics, allowing more magic to enter. In this way, the laws of physics apparently break themselves.
The following evidence supports my hypothesis:
-70% of friends of magic users have reported to have multiple friends that use magic
-97% of all magic users who gained their powers after age 20 have reported to have friends with these capabilities
-90% of magic users who gained their powers past age 20 share at least one major ability with one of their friends, if applicable.
-40% of combatants who survive attack through magical means later gain magical powers.
-54% of
Studying these results, I have concluded that magic tends to spread from person to person. This could have drastic ramifications. It might, perhaps, lead to a distortion of the laws of physics as we know it. It might also elevate us to a higher plane of existence. Magic has only been studied recently, and its long-term effects on the population are unknown.
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As the team started to disperse,
Amatin scrambled to effectively communicate the next course of action to everybody. As Varron took to the Plaza and Kayle headed to the Arcane University's planetside headquarters where graduates had a free dorm available at all times, Amatin was about to halt everyone, but realized that it would also disrupt everyone else walking through the streets and just be socially awkward in general. A leader's got to keep a reputation going, at least.
He resorted to texting everyone. He typed out the following:
Milia, Zakroff: I'll have to ask you two to sell the group's loot. Our lives may depend on things we buy here, so 'no' is not an answer, sorry.
Everyone else, THIS IS IMPORTANT: if you want something sold, give it to Milia before we split up even more. That cloak lets her carry enormous weights, so don't worry too much about it being a burden.After pressing send to all, he looked up. Milia, Jaffar, Zakroff, and Herros all slowed down and got out their communicators.
Milia turned around and walked up to Amatin, asking,
"Why couldn't you just ask?""That, Milia, would be awkward to do when everybody is already leaving. We'd get stared at."Shrugging, Milia turned around, asked the group for any items that need to be sold--reminding everyone though that paradoxically, she was NOT going to accept becoming the group's mule, even though it made no difference.
Milia picked up the loot to be sold, and insisted on somebody tech-savvy to come along.
Jaffar raised his hand and led the way.
"On the way down I saw a store with a large image projected onto a billboard. It read 'Sell Here,' so I think that's where we want to go.""Alright then."[5] On the way,
Jaffar got out his tablet and started trying to work Amelia into his tablet's system. But no matter where he put the files, running the startup.sh returned an INCORRECT_ARCHITECTURE message. Even using bootswap, his favorite program for running foreign operating systems and programs on his tablet, returned a similar message. He decided to open the scripts himself, discovering that the startup scripts did the following:
>check (SystemType() == 2)
--No?
>ReturnError(INCORRECT_ARCHITECT);
--Else...
>lib.rossnavy.aisystems.InterceptOS(Amelia.file);
That's better than having no clue, at least.
At the plaza, Milia spotted a store in the distance called "VendorMor: The Number One Store For Interstellar Travellers," aside from the regular stores, restaurants, and such.
She and Jaffar passed through the door, entering a large rectangular room with red-cloth covered tables at either side. Vendors at each table were apparently advertising their own products, buying and selling specific types of objects such as guns, armor, gadgets, and so on.
Milia walked up to the clerk at the end of the room, and asked for directions as to where to sell some merchandise--weapons, mainly. The clerk told her that it's simple, really. Just persuade the salesmen to accept the price you propose and voila.
With Jaffar's help (due to her own lack of economic skill), she sold the UPP Rifle plus ammo to the
Arms Dealer for
[2... hover over to read the miniconversation] 400 credits total, and the NovaTech rifle for
1000. However, she couldn't quite find anyone who would take dragon fangs.
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(Excuse me if I don't fit the roleplaying into this very nicely... it happened but I gotta keep the post short.)
Jaffar went back home to work on Amelia, Milia loitered about.
Meanwhile,
Kayle headed to the Spark district. Passing
Amatin on the walkway, she said
"Hi!" but then stopped right next to him, for the same reason that he stopped for.
Next to the road, there was a large pit, filled with
Amatin, having noticed Kayle, turned around and began,
"One old man on the side of the street told me, and I quote...
'Dem Weasel-Snakes been breedin' lateleh. I almst lost mah foot to wun o' dem!'
Now I think I understand how you could lose a foot to one of these..."[1] He was standing next to a large ditch by the side of the road, about three meters deep and three across. The sides of the pit were dotted with tunnels in all directions. In the center Amatin saw a packpack--on top of a few writhing snake-like things. The snakes themselves were covered in sparse reflective fur, probably to reflect some light to keep cool. They occasionally poked their heads out of the dogpile in order to apparently take a deep breath--expanding their inflatible neck--before diving back in.
"Well, I'm off to practice my shot. I heard that around here you can carry your gun wherever and whenever you want, as long as you don't actually shoot anyone. There's a field of dirt somewhere near the toxic dump, they say, where you can practice shooting targets attached to the local trees. The trees are pretty resilient from what I hear--and I mean to heat, too. The planet gets pretty hot with a two-hour night and a twenty hour day."Amatin paid no attention, instead looking for a stick to poke the snakes with.
"That's pretty nice. You do that. I'll be going too... after I do this..."Nobody quite knows why they're named Weasel-Snakes, although their tendency to dig out elaborate networks to hide in may have contributed to their naming.
The Weasel-Snake is one of the few native animals inhabiting the Great Centauri Desert--one of the planet's larger wastelands. They are scavengers that spend most of their time underground. They are cold-blooded, gaining most of their heat from the warm dry dirt, and only rarely coming out to the surface except to search.
They are actually quite rare, primarily because of their inefficient but mostly sustainable method of acquiring food. Most scavengers eat other animal's prey. Weasel-Snakes, however, almost always depend on mother nature to do the work for them. They settle near ditches, at the bottoms of canyons, and near hostile terrain features and sedentary animals. They wait for animals to fall in, like they usually do, and then rush in to finish the job before the animal can recover and heal. Their poison merely prevents all regeneration. It does not kill or paralyze or even cause pain. Rather, it keeps victims from getting up and walking away, while the snakes feed on the animal daily until there is nothing left.
The poison has no known cure--it is highly advised to avoid them, and to be careful around canyons, because being bitten after being seriously injured can spell death for most people.
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Kayle was now at the "firing range." What it actually was, equated to a dirt field with a small pocket of trees in the distance--about 100m away. [3] She fired, and hit everything spot-on. No misses. She wanted to practice from a farther distance. But moving back too far, she almost fell over a ledge. Below was one of the groups of makeshift homes endemic to the Spark District. Consisting of abanonded or cracked cargodrop crates, shipping containers, steel plating, and fragments of concrete, the Spark Slums housed about a third of Empire City's population.
Considering only about half of the people in the city at any given time actually live in the city, that figure wasn't as appaling as it was. But it was still a shame that these people didn't settle for more. They seemed to prefer life in the Spark Distrift. Fixing damaged ships, looking through scrap, and manufacturing all sorts of stuff in warehouses and makeshift buildings, that was the life of the average Spark-class citizen.
Suddenly, she received a message from Jaffar...
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*snip snip snip*
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Caplus, escorted by his faithful robotic buddy, headed into the Steam District with shield engaged and head high. These imperialists... they knew nothing! [2] He couldn't resist getting into at least three arguments on the way, in which he was skillfully outplayed with words every time. Angry, he examined the skyline, looking through company logos and symbols, eager to find a company offering some kind of software for his helmet, or perhaps even augments, although he wasn't about to get augmented himself...
He stopped next to the main building of a local company called
Revolution Inc. He entered throguh the revolving door, slamming it on the way to relieve a bit of anger, and walked across the lobby floor, and slammed his fists on the help desk.
He wondered why everyone around him seemed to be running. Then he remembered, his armor was walking behind him, holding its rifle as it went.
Doh!The armor as behind him, walking at a steady pace as opposed to his own brisk run. He ran back to it, grabbed the rifle, and stuck it in his backpack, away from view.
Casually, he returned to the help desk, asking softly,
"Where can I buy some software for my armor?"The accountant stared at Caplus, her eyes wide open. Apparently she hadn't seem experimental Ross armor before.
"Uh, you can get our catalog right here... (she motioned to the side of the desk, where a few catalogs stood, halfway folded) although you might want to make sure it's compatible with that... armor of yours first..."Satisfied, Caplus plucked a catalog from those on the desk, knocking the others down. He examined what he could buy.
{Centauri Equipment Only}
>King's Watch (Advanced reflexive software. Uses your suit's sensors to find and highlight enemies and point out their weak spots as well as display a detailed description next to them, taken from an encrypted military-grade database. Purchased only with a government advanced software use license.)-2500 Credits
>Medical Software (Displays advanced medical information, diagnoses diseases and health problems, and more importantly, required for Centauri Adaptive Medical Gear to work.)-200 Credits
{Fully Compatible}
>Social Enhancer (Indentifies personality types based on a short interaction, giving you hints as to what to say)-500 Credits
>Teleprompter Pro (Displays semi-intelligent responses to other's queries) (+1 Persuasion) (REQUIRES BIOCHIP)-300 Credits
>Pheremones (Fabricates pheremones... out of nowhere. Starts off all nearby conversations with +2 persuasion)-500 Credits
>Marksman Helper (+1 Accuracy)-700 Credits
>AI Helper (Recieve any one of our intelligent AI's, alogn with a biochip!)-1200 Credits
{Illegal} (You'll have to 'convince' somebody to get this. You also don't know about it)
>Power Core Regulator (Allows you to overclock your fusion core, giving a 1/6 chance to blow up, not killing you--but it will hurt--while at the same time giving you massive bonuses to anything that requires power. Comes with a free universal power adapter and power cord, so you can use it with energy weapons!) (REQUIRES FUSION CORE)-2000 Credits
Author
Topic: Space Wizard RTD: Rolls. (Read 86095 times)