• This section is for roleplays only.
    ALL interest checks/recruiting threads must go in the Recruit Here section.

    Please remember to credit artists when using works not your own.

Splicers - I Am Legion - IC Thread

OOC
Here
Characters
Here
Lore
Here
As Chaska and Woodstock dive after Lance and Pretty Bird, Chaska feels relief with each passing moment. Being up in the sky with no cover, nowhere to hide, as plain and easy to see, Chaska feels like a living fireworks display for the Machine to come and find and rend and terminate. But closer to the ground meant his chances - their chances - for survival increased literally by the second.

Yet Chaska feels Lance's reaction to these new scorpion-Machines is... troublesome. There were no signs of humans here, just the scorpion-Machines searching for Gaia-knows-what. If just the mere sight of Machines alone set Lance off like this... well... Lance might very well lose his berserker mind to passion and violence. This might lead him and Pretty Bird to an early grave. Other Splicers might call this approach heroic or reckless or any number of things. Chaska feels Lance's approach, while admirable for his apparent selflessness, is simply the opposite of his own - stealth-first, gather facts, kill fast when the enemy is weakest, and disappear before he is found.

The Deliveryman realizes it then - Lance is a giant screaming hawk, Chaska the quiet leopard. Toni? Perhaps a great lioness? Time would tell.

Seeing the tracks, Chaska grimaces. How it must kill Lance inside for him to restrain himself so!

He dives gravity assisting his speed so he is ground level again almost instantly.
Over comms he finally responds once they are low to the ground and heading towards their destination.

"I'm finding them on the way back even if I have to do it alone."
Chaska nods in acknowledgement. "Alone? Take Pretty Bird with you," the survivor advises coolly, "or you die."

Memorizing the tracks as best he can, he adds, "Lance listen. Afta mission, if Kraken and opportunity allow, Chaska help you find and keel de Scorpion-Machines." He pauses, not wishing to invite himself into what appears to an Outrider's personal hunt.

"That is... if you... want Chaska help?"

Chaska leaves Toni's name out of this. Each Splicer must decide their own fate and walk their own road. Whatever Toni decided on the matter, Chaska would try to respect. In the meantime, the enemy Facility and the Kraken's wrath awaited.
 
The two Machines go on their way, with their attention focused on ground before them and not into the air behind them. Using your own advanced optics and other sensors, you are able to accelerate away without being spotted. Without any signs of the Machine around, you are able to set a good pace as you travel. Ahead of you are the ruins of a pair of farming distribution nodes. While the Machine doesn't need food, there have been cases where an ambush is set for any man or woman that makes the mistake of trying to raid the area for food more dangerous. But at this time, there is no need to worry about your supplies; you have plenty of food for over three months, and your Host Armor suits are usually able to feed themselves.
 
"Dumb trap," Chaska sniffs as he marks the position of the place as they travel. "Only most desperate of human will attempt. Machine must know this."

There was a time when Chaska was among those desperate. More than once had he displayed incredible patience and cunning to take food or supplies for himself back before he joined the Splicers. Never had he robbed from such a heavily-defended locale, but he remembered the first time he bit into a chocolate bar.

Pure heaven! It was one great delicacy he could not get on his own.

How a person could change when the desire and talent were great enough!
 
Keeping low to stay under any line of sight of the two robots, the group speeds along, heading on your course through the ruined city. Soon enough, it is time to drop down to the ground to place the next of the Trailblazer bio-signal booster for the upcoming Kamikaze missile strike. It is a quick process that you are getting more and more confident doing, and it is only a moment before you are back up in the air and speeding along towards your target.

You are making excellent progress towards the Industrial Complex, and if you continue your pace, you'll get there with several days to spare to lie low and observe your target for the best possible places to hide the Squealers.
 
"Everybody everywhere, feel it in the air
Oh yeah, it's time to take the pressure off
Everybody everywhere, step out into the future
It's time to take the pressure off"
- Duran Duran (Source: Genius lyrics)

"Duran Duran - Pressure Off (feat. Janelle Monáe and Nile Rodgers) [Official Music Video]"

As time and distance become more and more, Chaska finds himself relaxing. Recording what he can, the Deliveryman tries to adapt to flying towards missions instead of his own methods of stalking steadily on the ground like a ghost at strike of midnight. Unused to viewing the world from above where there is no cover and no place to hide, Chaska is never far from his perceived escape routes. All the while, the feeling of moving through the air and the unusual sensations of liberation give him a new point of view - life through the eyes of the flight-capable Outrider.

While Chaska and his bio-birb, Woodstock, have long been a team, Chaska only took flight as means of escape from enemy forces - as means of survival. Here? It's almost a means of recreation! Something to be enjoyed. There is an addictive quality to it. The longer they fly, the more Chaska finds himself glancing at Woodstock, Pretty Bird, and his fellow Splicer, Lance. This is Lance's world after all.

Zooming along inside his beloved Host Armor, WyldKat, Chaska the Deliveryman feels his world expand. He is more glad than ever that Lance and Pretty Bird are among them. Perhaps this is a little of what Chief Rybeck already understood when he dubbed them his Cerberus Gorehounds.

It was one more reason to fight - the act of living... and this was certainly living!
 
Everyone please give me a Perception roll. Purr Purr , what is your bonus on Perception for you and your tweetie bird?
 
As Chaska and Woodstock dive after Lance and Pretty Bird, Chaska feels relief with each passing moment. Being up in the sky with no cover, nowhere to hide, as plain and easy to see, Chaska feels like a living fireworks display for the Machine to come and find and rend and terminate. But closer to the ground meant his chances - their chances - for survival increased literally by the second.

Yet Chaska feels Lance's reaction to these new scorpion-Machines is... troublesome. There were no signs of humans here, just the scorpion-Machines searching for Gaia-knows-what. If just the mere sight of Machines alone set Lance off like this... well... Lance might very well lose his berserker mind to passion and violence. This might lead him and Pretty Bird to an early grave. Other Splicers might call this approach heroic or reckless or any number of things. Chaska feels Lance's approach, while admirable for his apparent selflessness, is simply the opposite of his own - stealth-first, gather facts, kill fast when the enemy is weakest, and disappear before he is found.

The Deliveryman realizes it then - Lance is a giant screaming hawk, Chaska the quiet leopard. Toni? Perhaps a great lioness? Time would tell.

Seeing the tracks, Chaska grimaces. How it must kill Lance inside for him to restrain himself so!


Chaska nods in acknowledgement. "Alone? Take Pretty Bird with you," the survivor advises coolly, "or you die."

Memorizing the tracks as best he can, he adds, "Lance listen. Afta mission, if Kraken and opportunity allow, Chaska help you find and keel de Scorpion-Machines." He pauses, not wishing to invite himself into what appears to an Outrider's personal hunt.

"That is... if you... want Chaska help?"

Chaska leaves Toni's name out of this. Each Splicer must decide their own fate and walk their own road. Whatever Toni decided on the matter, Chaska would try to respect. In the meantime, the enemy Facility and the Kraken's wrath awaited.

"Bird and me are one, Help is acceptable, the machines having beast like that rampaging the land killing civilians is not."

It takes a surprising amount of knowledge to pilot in the skies. The third dimension adds a hell of a lot of complications that ground fighting never really had. One of those he exploited earlier. That height increases the distance to the horizon thus how far away you can see and be seen from.

Low to the ground is good for stealth and he knows that his companion can manage the maneuvers through terrain and be ready to battle at a moments notice. They can see each other's emotions through the biological cable running between them. The bird isn't supposed to have those and testing doesn't reveal anything abnormal but he knows to live is to have a soul. He knows that the way it fights is all rage and viciousness. Not a mindless automaton of flesh and blood.

The lance is heavy in his hand, not in a physical weight, but in a mental one. Because he knows underneath it all, he isn't that different from his mount and people can be monsters just as easily as the machines.

The open sky always makes him introspective, to have such freedom and be bound by such obligations. It makes a man think and wonder if any of them are truly free.
 
Flying along, Chaska's keen eye is able to spot a large number of targets in the air in front of you. At first, he thought that the circling objects might be birds, right up to the point where he could see several of these objects dive down and launch some missiles at a target or targets on the ground. Clearly not birds. Cycling through the various visual options available to you, the objects in the air are clearly mechanical and not bio-organic, so this is not a group of fellow Resistance members fighting against the Machine. It is difficult to tell exactly how many jet fighters there are due to their erratic flight paths, but there is at least a dozen if not more directly in your flight path. This doesn't include what might be on the ground in that area, also.

This gives you a few options. You can either 1, go to ground, sit tight and hope they leave, 2, continue on your path and hope that you are not spotted, 3, engage the numerically superior force of fighters and hope you win, 4, go around them, or 5, take to the underground tunnel network that crisscross the area, get past the fliers, then go back above ground to continue on your way.

What do you guys wish to do?
 
At the moment, only Chaska has spotted them. I am sorry I was not more clear about that in my earlier post.
 
Once Chaska shares what he's seen, Toni lets out a few choice curse words. "Everybody down! Before the tin cans spot us!" She shifts course and dives for the ground.

OOC What kind of terrain are we flying over at the moment?
 
OOC What kind of terrain are we flying over at the moment?
Rolling hills with moderate tree growth that will provide ample cover from being spotted, so long as you don't do something to draw attention to yourselves.
 
Chaska is already aimed in that direction when Toni's voice comes over the Bio-Comms. His own voice is as smooth and cool as newly-forged steel. "Iz troo, Toni. We fly to Machine jet fighters? We die."

Keeping a firm hold on Woodstock as he dives lest they get separated by the force of gravity or the power of their descent, Chaska looks for the best spots to hide Lance and Pretty Bird. Once they near such a spot, Chaska activates his Stealth Field and - ever-treating Woodstock with the respect worthy of a human, he asks Woodstock to activate his Camouflage.

Thinking ahead, the ever-wary Deliveryman takes in a patient lungful of air to calm himself. Softly exhaling, he asks Lance and Toni. "We stay until Machine leave, yes? If we move - try go undaground or around, maybe they see us."
 
As you break through the tops of the trees and get under the cover offered by the canopy of leaves, you realize that you are not alone. Less than eight hundred feet away from you is a large attack robot.

1715460611218.png

You have all been schooled in the primary robot forces of the Machine to know that this is an extermination unit called a Battle Track. It is pretty big, standing over 20 feet tall and 22 feet long, and weighing 32 tons. This is a tough opponent, with over 500 points of armor on its main body along with a 200 point force field. Each arm is equipped with heavy weapons, missiles in its chest, and four mortar artillery pieces on its back. It is currently moving slow, at about fifteen mph, with large spotlights illuminating the area as it is obviously searching for something (or someone). But unlike the two machines that you passed by earlier, this Battle Track has clearly detected you and is spinning about to engage you.

You do know that if this machine gets to send out a signal that it has spotted you, it is most likely that some of the Sky Fighters you spotted off in the distance will be the first to respond. At the distance they are at, and assuming an instant response, it will take a minimum of three melee rounds before any of the air units are close enough to be able to try and detect your squad and try to engage. If you are able to take out the Battle Track before the air units arrive, you have a good chance of being able to get under enough cover with your Stealth Field/Camouflage abilities that you have to be able to vanish from detection and not get engaged. There is also the nearby entrance to the tunnels that you could use to evade the swarming Sky Fighters. But right now, you have the very real threat from the Battle Track that is looking to blow all of you away.

Initiative Rolls, everyone!
 
Eonivar Eonivar

The past two days have been rather hectic for you. You and eight others were sent out from one of the many hidden bases in the mountains to investigate reports that a small community of about 180 people has gone missing. When your squad arrived at the encampment, in the middle of the abandoned structures you found small traces of blood, but not any bodies. In past cases like this, the Machine has either killed people on the spot and left their remains to rot, or they have gathered up the refugees into a large group and wiped them out in bulk. This time, neither one appears to be the case.

Your team was still exploring the ruins, hoping to find a survivor to share what the hell happened here, when you were jumped by a patrol of the killer robots. Your squad commander managed to buy the rest of you enough time to get away, but at the cost of his own life. Since that time, two other members of the team has fallen to the Machine as you have been gunning and running, trying to get back to your home base.

Right now, you and one other member of the team, a fellow Roughneck named Axel, have been split off from the rest of the team. A swarm of Sky Fighters have been strafing a position several miles from you in the position that you suspect the rest of the team is, and here is one hell of a large battle robot hot on your heels. Things are looking rather bleak. Axel has run out of curse words that he knows to describe the situation you are both in, and he has the vocabulary of a dock worker. But then something wonderful happens. Your bio-comms, which only have a range of six miles, suddenly picked up a snippet of conversation of a woman's voice shouting, "Everybody down! Before the tin cans spot us!" Clearly there are other members of the Resistance nearby.

Just as this thought crosses your mind, a powerful energy blast cuts through the trees and nearly crosses your mind in a very different way, and in a manner that would be much more unpleasant, reminding you that the Battle Track is still right on your tails.

Please give me an Initiative roll.
 
Initiative roll for Toni

Modified 20
MDC by Location:
Arms (2): 117 M.D.C.
Hands (2): 27 M.D.C.
Legs (2): 117 M.D.C.
Feet (2): 37 M.D.C.
Head: 137 M.D.C.
Main Body: 260 M.D.C.
Bio-Force Field: 140 M.D.C.

Combat Bonuses On Foot / In Armor

Number of Attacks: 4 / 6
Strike: +8 / +9 (+2 in melee) (+3 ranged)
Parry: +12 / +15 (+1 in melee)
Dodge: +12 / +4 Automatic Dodge
Roll with Punch: +2 / +10
Initiative: +0 / +2
Perception: +7 / +7
Critical Strike on a Natural 20
 
As you prepare to fight, Chaska, Toni and Lance all pick up a signal over your Bio-Comms, a male voice saying, "Jin! You ok? That last shot looked like it clipped you!" You know that it is not any unit of the Machine using the bio-comm, so it has to be fellow Resistance fighters right in your immediate area.

Initiative Order

20 - Toni <====
19 - Chaska
19 - Lance
15 - Battle Track
11 - Jin
8 - Axel

Psychie Psychie You are up first. Your range to the Battle Track is approximately 800 feet. The terrain is hilly with a moderate level of forest cover.
 
Toni snaps on her force field, knowing that this robot has the potential to do some serious damage to them. She calls out on the bio-comm, "Watch your targets, Cerberus! We have friendlies in the area!" She sticks to the air for the added mobility, and with a shrug of her shoulders she levels her dual Casting Throwers at the Battle Track and fires a dual burst of four rounds from each weapon.

OOC - 26 to hit, 44 damage
MDC by Location:
Arms (2): 117 M.D.C.
Hands (2): 27 M.D.C.
Legs (2): 117 M.D.C.
Feet (2): 37 M.D.C.
Head: 137 M.D.C.
Main Body: 260 M.D.C.
Bio-Force Field: 140 M.D.C.

Combat Bonuses On Foot / In Armor

Number of Attacks: 4 / 6
Strike: +8 / +9 (+2 in melee) (+3 ranged)
Parry: +12 / +15 (+1 in melee)
Dodge: +12 / +4 Automatic Dodge
Roll with Punch: +2 / +10
Initiative: +0 / +2
Perception: +7 / +7
Critical Strike on a Natural 20

Casting Thrower x2 - 1d8+3 single shot, 3d8+10 for a four round burst - ammo 120 / 112
Omega Blaster - 2d8x10
Forearm Blades - 5d8
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back
Top