JMHthe3rd's CYOA Fiction

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

This is an index for my CYOA-related fiction, which can be found throughout the General CYOA Thread.

I've find these to be excellent creative writing prompts. I'll add more as I write them. Comments and criticism are welcome.

CONDUIT
Conduit CYOA Rules Sheets

Richard James Emerson 1
__________

CYBERPUNK

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-9#post-1954668

Chef d'Escadron Azra Ahmed 1

Dr. Hadley Mabella 1
Dr. Hadley Mabella 2
__________

DOMAIN MASTER

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-12#post-2002693

Alchera of the Dreaming Sky

Character Sheet

__________

GOLDEN HORDE

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-8#post-1935066

Jungso-Husun Khan

__________

JUMPCHAIN

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.315809/page-70#post-16040393

http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.315809/page-28#post-15851954

Lieutenant Ar'zava'niva
[Star Wars: The Clone Wars]

Dr. Martin Polakowski
[Fallout]

__________

NECROMANCER

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-17#post-2344508

Jon Huffingwell

Character Sheet

__________

OVERLORD

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-15#post-2140810

Marvis J. Hunsley

__________

POST-APOCALYPTIC SETTLEMENT

Post-Apocalyptic Settlement

Dr. James Marlin Howell

Character Sheet

__________

POWER ARMOR

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-13#post-2034923

Dr. Linda Brickle

Character Sheet

Mackenzie Hackworth

Angel Zacarias

__________

REBELLION

https://feathersnake.wordpress.com/2015/01/30/rebellion-cyoa/

"Professor" Javier De Haro

Character Sheet

__________

SPACE OPERA REFUGEE ADVENTURE

http://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/general-cyoa-thread.8449/page-18#post-2547043

Prince Jurian Malachi-Nguyen Hohenlohe-Cygnus

Character Sheet

__________

STAR DUST

http://imgur.com/gallery/ReaUJ

Prologue (Michael Han)
Chapter One (Commander Marcella Zeppelin)

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Cyberpunk CYOA

Dr. Hadley Mabella
---~1~---
Atlantis, South Pacific Ocean
2088

Emergency fluorescents flicker as nozzles spray frigid seawater into the cramped chamber. Hadley is hunched beside the control touchscreen, armwire jacked in, his consciousness a paradox of compartmentalized focus. Captured-yet-fleeting within his audiovisual manifold, he senses surveillance feeds and sentry drones and the helmet cams of the security details who patrol in force throughout the spacious halls of the administration district.

On the far side of the titanium iris above, guards wait with weapons drawn. Through the iris below, three Manta-drones swim in lazy orbits. No longer are they hunting. They know where he is. They think they have him trapped.

He shouldn't be able to do what he's doing, locked in an airlock in the underbelly of the city, but the system has backdoors for those who know where to look. As if twitching phantom limbs, he mentally flexes through the innards of the central neural network, using code-cracking implants to bash down flimsy firewalls. He plays with Atlantis' soul as if it were his own. For it is. He designed it, after all.

He directs most of his attention on the power plant systems, but a shard of his mind notes the pink hue of the water swirling around his knees. Kay's hemo-seal spray isn't quite working. He swivels one of his eyes to her.

His niece sits slumped against the curved gray bulkhead, fairly bobbing in the rising water which already reaches her chest. She cradles her arm, and though the open wound is half-submerged, he can clearly see the shrapnel-chewed muscle and bone where the ceramic bullet struck her bicep. The trauma is deep and wet and raw, but mostly free from blood. She'll drown before she bleeds to death. Which is good, because he doesn't have anything to use as a tourniquet.

She looks at her arm and winces. "I'm cold," she says weakly, though her blue wetsuit should regulate her temperature; the stims should counter the worst of the shock.

He offers no reply, but like a tickle his social processor tells him he should reassure her. That's what uncles are supposed to do. He forgets, sometimes.

"I'm overriding the safety protocols on the fusion reactor," he explains, keeping his voice quick and shallow--he doesn't need much air; she does. He adds, "I'm going to shut down the coolant, allow it to go critical."

Somehow, she fails to appear reassured. Her head lolls. Her eyelids, shrouded by soaked black bangs, droop to half-mast. "You're . . . you're going to blow us up?"

He uses a backdoor to access the Mantas. He can't override their programming outright, but should they lose contact with AtSec . . .

To Kay, he says, "No, the shields should keep out the worst of the heat; then the backup systems should jettison the core. But during that hundredth of a second, magnetic coils are going to switch on." He makes a smile. It feels weird. "I'm going to ensure they overload. A lot."

"An EMP?" she asks. Her voice is bleary and half-mumbled, as if belonging to a toddler half her age. "That's not going to help. Security drones are hardened."

Smart girl. Like her mother. "Oh, ye of little faith," he says and tries another smile. It feels more real this time.

There's a Minnow-Class submersible docked four hundred meters southwest, outside the estimated EMP radius. Hadley remotely activates the small sub's magnetohydrodynamic drive, releases its docking clamps and locks its access to anyone but him. As a last step, he turns on the airlock's camera, looks into its lens and says in a loud voice over the splashing water, "I am Doctor Hadley Mabella, Chief Software Architect of the Atlantis Netocracy. Our police department has shot my niece and fired upon me. Currently, we are locked in an airlock which they are flooding. This illegal attack has been authorized by President Aalders. She's behind the media blackout. Here's what she didn't want you to see."

With faint, localized concentration, he sorts and attaches recently deleted surveillance feeds and emails to the data packet and seeds the message deep in Atlantis' neural network. A few hours from now, after the power returns, this will broadcast on every touchscreen, every holovid, every AR contact. Aalders will have some explaining to do.

But he hesitates. Perhaps he should have said more. Did he remember to make facial expressions? He was never very good at speeches.

But now the water is up to Kay's neck, and she groans with chem-dulled pain as she struggles to keep her head aloft. Hadley sends the final activation signals and unplugs his armwire, severing his consciousness from Atlantis' soul. Five seconds later, he hears a crash and the lights go out--in the airlock, and all across Atlantis.

Kay cries, splashes. The nozzles continue to spray. Hadley's vision switches to infrared, transforming the dark chamber into a rainbow world of blues smeared with red, orange and yellow.

Kneeling in the thigh-deep water, he fishes his hands into the inky depths until he finds the outer airlock's manual release on the edge of the floor. He opens the panel and pulls, twists. Twists, pulls. The crank remains stubborn. Fear leaks into his brain.

"This is a shitty way to die," Kay says between gasps that could be sobs. She tries to stand and almost succeeds.

Hadley shakes the crank, jerks back and forth and up and down, screaming like the wild chimp he's become. It's not fair they're going to kill her she didn't do anything we're all going to die this is bullshit. . .

But then he blocks targeted pathways in his amygdala, and the panic subsides. He proceeds with precise, exploratory force and pressure until the crank shifts and turns and the iris in the floor grinds open .

Sidestepping the new moon pool to the Pacific depths, he pulls Kay to her feet with her good arm. He grips her head and forces her to look at him. Her face is lava in midnight that trembles through his palms. Cold water cascades over them both.

"I can't see," she says.

And she can't breathe water. She has no augments of any kind. But then, she's only twelve.

"I'm going to need you to relax," he says. "Be calm, lower your heart rate. You'll waste less oxygen that way."

"Haddy, I'm scared."

He wonders why everyone doesn't have endocrine-inhibiting implants--and what to say to a frightened little girl.

"Don't worry. If you die, you won't exist, and you won't be scared anymore."

By infrared, Hadley can see the echo of a bitter grin in her shining orange flesh. "Gee, thanks," she says with a sniffle or a laugh. But she knows him. She understands.

Even standing, the water is past her waist. "You'll need to hold your breath for two, maybe three minutes. Maybe longer," he says. "Exhale. Let it all out. Do it. Now take a deep breath. As much as you can. Now hold it. Hold it! And hold on to me!"

He pulls her to him and steps over the open iris to fall into the ocean world. The wetsuit fights back the worst of the cold. The implant where half of his right lung use to be tickles as the filters extract oxygen from seawater.

He switches to light enhancement, and as expected the three Manta-drones are still swimming in slow, wavy circles--waiting, but not attacking. Disconnected from Atlantis Security, they've reverted to the secondary programming imparted to them: Protect Dr. Hadley Mabella.

Kay hugs him in one-armed awkwardness as he tugs the armwire from his left wrist. As a Manta swims by, he grabs hold of the ventral maintenance panel, and the mattress-sized drone drags them along in its idle flight. Hadley slides the panel aside and jacks the armwire into the interface port. Its eyes are his eyes. Its mind is his mind. He takes control.

Dangling by one hand, the other holding Kay's, Hadley directs the Mantas in a sloped dive that swoops into a level, if not steady, vector. The drones' rubbery biopolymer wings flap like seagulls as thrumming hydrojets rush them through the water until he and Kay wag like a tail behind the lead Manta.

He feels no fear but only anticipatory disquiet, for though Kay is minutes from death and he is hanging for his life from a biomechanical fish, the weaker, less augmented shards of his mind can do nothing but watch the gray and green sprawl of avenues and alleyways and power cables and water turbines pass scant meters above as the drones soar beneath the bottom half of Atlantis' cityscape.

It's a sight he's seen a thousand times; only now is it beautiful.

They pass over a pair of EMP-fried submersibles, turning and rocking as they sink slowly into the dark Pacific depths. The occupants will probably be rescued in time. Probably. Not that he's at fault. If anyone dies today, Aalders is to blame.

Hadley was born in Atlantis back when it was a few old supercarriers strapped together. He grew up here, helped it grow into the city-state before him. And now some corporate-Philistine of a President thinks he's expendable? Or a threat?

Hadley intends to find answers. The message from his sister is as good as lead as any.

The police appear from behind a corner, a hundred meters to the rear. Their hydrojet packs trailing angry bubbles, the five figures close the distance like a squad of human torpedoes. They aim gyrojet machine pistols in his direction, and he has no doubt they're target assisted.

His Manta can't outswim them, not dragging two humans, so he throws the drone into defensive maneuvers while he circles around the two wing drones to intercept. Gunfire streaks curve and crisscross the water, but hunter-seeker bullets can only change trajectories so much, not to mention their limited propellant. The police should have waited.

His Manta banks around a hospital basement block, but he can still see the combat through the drones' eyes. The Mantas and jetpack police weave mad atomic diagrams of bubble streams as they dogfight like something out of an old 2-D war movie. Though they wear badges on their chest, the uniforms aren't the usual APD. Probably shore-based contractors. Their wetsuits are bulky enough to be armored, but when one of the cops' arms explodes from its shoulder in a flower-cloud of gore, Hadley concludes they're not spec'd against the Mantas' 11.5mm autocannons.

The Mantas aren't bullet proof either, but it doesn't matter who wins. Their sacrifice buys time, and Kay is asphyxiating, maybe drowning. He can feel her thrash in his vice grip. He wonders what he would feel if she were to die. He doesn't want to find out.

Swooping from beneath an underwater garage, their Manta arrives at the docked Minnow. More police greet them. Less than twenty meters away, the four officers float beneath the open moon pool of the docking facility, a small Sting-drone by their side. One of them points. They raise their guns.

The blocked paths in the amygdala disallow panic, but Hadley feels the transcendent rush of analysis and calculation. Of logos. He triggers his neural accelerators. The world grinds to a crawl.

The police bullets plow slow gouges through the water as their rockets grant them gradual velocity. The Sting-drone sweeps left for a flanking maneuver. With an unmoving eye Hadley assess the situation and between heartbeats knows the Shortest Path.

Time resumes. The Manta flips on its side and dives as he pulls in his legs and plants his feet on the drone's underbelly as if he is surfing in a crouch upside down. Kay swings from his arm at an angle that burns the tendons of his shoulder, yet he still tries to pull her close. The Manta shudders as bullets chew into its dorsal hide, and Hadley banks and soars the drone up towards the sealed moon pool of the whale-shaped Minnow.

Timing is everything. That's what his social therapist always told him. There are times when one shouldn't say certain things; there are times when one must say certain things; facial expressions should be used appropriately--people are finicky, confusing things. But Hadley understands objects. He knows the dynamics of causality, the ballet of physical interaction.

Issuing his final orders to the Manta, he unjacks his armwire from the control interface and releases his grip on the maintenance panel. Inertia carries him and his niece the final four meters to the sealed iris, and as the half-dead drone charges the police, its autocannons' deep bass shaking through the water, Hadley slams out his palm to the moon pool's touch-lock pane.

The iris opens. Hadley grips the lip of the portal, and nearly wrenches his arm from his socket as he all but throws Kay through into the Minnow's pressurized interior. The Manta offers distraction, but stray bullets buzz by like aquatic bees. He glances at the flanking Sting-drone--thirty meters away, twin guns firing- and pulls himself through.

Something like a sledgehammer explodes into his right leg, but he turns off the pain and rolls onto the rubber mat of the submersible's deck. Kay is beside him, eyes bugged from near-asphyxiation as she shivers and arcs and coughs and takes deep, heaving gasps of the Minnow's air.

But no rest for the wicked. Hadley spares a glance at his right knee and sees he doesn't have one. The shin's still attached, a little. He drags himself across the deck to the Minnow's cockpit, climbs into the seat. A worrying volume of blood flows from the stump.

The docking clamps are free, the MHD drive warmed up, and so Hadley says, "Hold on, Kay!" and pushes on the manual control stick. The Minnow sails forward with scarcely a hum. Explosive-tipped bullets tap metallically against her hull, but the submersible's titanium-alloy armor is spec'd for oceanic trench duty. He pushes harder on the stick and feels the faint pull of acceleration. They made it. They're safe. He leans back into the chair's formfitting cushion, his head dizzy, his eyelids fluttering . . .

Splashing, a thump. His niece's cry is choked and gurgled. Hadley's arms flutter as he awkwardly turns in his seat. A police officer is halfway through the moon pool (The open moon pool! He forgot, damn it!) and is holding himself up with a hand and a swim-finned shoe on the handlebar circling the portal. The Minnow's movement sprays water around him, but that can't hide the intestines spilling through his bullet-ripped wetsuit.

Though the re-breather obscures the cop's face, there's no mistaking that annoying French accent.

"Mabella!" Security Chief Absolon gasps with a heaving breath. His free hand raises a pistol. "You blow Atlantis' power grid to save yourself? Why? Do you think you don't deserve this? We know what you've done."

"I don't," Hadley says indignantly

Absolon levels the gun. Hadley shrugs. His limbs feel cold, heavy.

Kay's kick has little strength, but it knocks aside the chief's fin-shoe, and he half-falls through the moon pool, only his grip on the handlebar keeping him from dropping completely out of the Minnow. Hadley spends a dull second watching the gloved fist clench and strain as the wounded policeman tries to pull himself up, before turning back to the cockpit controls. Calmly, somewhat uneasily, he jacks in his armwire, overrides the safeties and activates the moon pool's emergency containment.

The iris bangs shut. Through a trick of tension, inertia and lateral acceleration, the severed hand actually summersaults in the air before splashing into the inches-deep seawater sloshing across the deck. Hadley sets the Minnow into a gentle dive, maximum speed. He looks at his knee. Still missing. Still gushing.

"Kay? Would you mind fetching the emergency medical kit? I seem to be bleeding to death."

After a liberal application of hemo-seal and tourniquets, Hadley opens the titanium shutters guarding the cockpit windows. An aquamarine void greets them, spangled with flittering life. It may have cost them an arm and a leg, but they've made it.

But it's not over yet.

His niece sits in the co-pilot seat next to him. "Where are we going?" she asks.

Hadley would pat her arm, but it's in a compression sling. And he's too weak for the effort, anyway. He spots Absolon's handgun sloshing in the blood-pink water by his feet. Useful.

"Baghdad, honey. We're going to find your mother."

13,374 characters = 25Y

Total: 50Y

Background
Mind over Matter: Dr. Hadley Mabella is a 37 year old scientist with Asperger's/mild-autism. His implants not only aid him in social interaction, but also have augmented his already brilliant mind. I wanted to create a non-combat oriented character who's also not "wimpy."

Skills

Hacking: 1
Bot Ops: 2
Technology: 4

Hardware

EMP Mesh
Enhanced Senses
Respiration Augment

Wetware

Endocrine Control
Hyperawareness Implant
Mnemonic Augmentation
Social Analyzer
Multitasking
ICE Breakers
Sensorium Override

Nanoware

Universal Interface
Mental Speed
Skillware (Bot Ops)

Ally
The Razor

Enemy
The Enforcer (Security Chief Absolon)

Complications

Watchlist
Exiled

Settings

Home: Atlantis
Neutral: Baghdad Research Institute
Enemy: Paris

Antagonist
Ascension Core: Seven years ago, Hadley's sister abandoned Atlantis to join a transhumanism cult. Recently he received a message from someone claiming to be her, asking for his help. Also, for some reason, the Atlantis President wants him dead. Either he knows too much or he did something bad, though Hadley has no idea what. His niece has been dragged along into this, if only because the APD have shown a remarkable lack of restraint (or aim) in their gunplay.

Gear

Credstick Titanium Upgrade +9, Crypto Upgrade +5 (+14)
Enhanced Fake ID (x2) +12, Special Access +7 (+19)
Peeper Spy Drone +3 (+3)
Cyberdeck +4, Portable +2, Electronic Bypass +2, AR Illusions +3, Hacker AI +3 (+14)

Total Cost: 50 Y

Also, Hadley has an RV-sized Minnow class mini-sub, which I imagine won't be much use in Baghdad. Also he has a 9.6mm gyrojet pistol and a handful of rounds of rocket-propelled, explosive-tipped ammunition. Gyrojets aren't all that great out of water, however. Still, explosive bullets.

Presumably, he's going to use his credstick to buy medical treatment for Kay's arm. And probably he'll have to buy himself a new leg.

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Character Sheet

Name: Mackenzie Hackworth ("Mack-Mack")
Gender: Male
Age: 27

Appearance: Life on the street has not been kind to Mack. He's covered in sores and smells like garbage. His teeth are brown or missing. Frequent substance abuse has left him a wild-eyed, scraggly-bearded countenance that frightens passersby. He's of average height and build, but seems smaller with his hunched posture, wheezing cough and weird, old-man gait.

Personality: People tend to dismiss Mack as a junkie hobo, and to be fair that's not an inaccurate assessment. However, he wasn't always this way, and beneath the drugs and crazy, Mack's a well educated, introspective man of great intelligence. He just doesn't use it very often.

He blames no one but himself for his circumstances, yet can't seem change his ways and rise above it. He's disengaged, bitter and not a little addled. Should anyone get into a conversation with him, he'll jabber their ear off with topics ranging from politics to philosophy to cosmology to self-depreciating druggie war stories. He's affable enough, unless he gets into one of his mood swings.

Character History: Before his fall, Mack's accomplishments were impressive. Falling out with his parents shortly after high school, Mack moved to New York and worked his way through college where he graduated with honors. The future looked bright . . . until the past began to haunt him, he picked up some bad habits and lost his job at the pharmacy. Unable to find new employment and saddled with crippling student loan payments, he soon found himself evicted from his apartment, and so he crashed on friends' couches for a while, vowing he would soon be back on his feet. But by then the rot had already taken hold. When he was kicked out of his last friend's home, Mack had given up all but the barest pretense of job hunting, spending his time instead tripping off cough medicine and watching old reruns of Scooby-Doo.

Mack has lived on the streets for a few months now, and it's taken it's toll. He panhandles; he dumpster dives; he drinks Robitussin and screams at rats.

He knows he's a loser. He knows he's at the frayed end of his life. The warm satisfaction of self-respect eludes him, however, and so he waits for death and doesn't care.

But then one day a glowing metal sphere falls from the sky and lands next to his dumpster . . .

Name: Vagabond
Class:Mesh
Body: Biped/Avian [20]
Colors: Mirrored Silver highlighted with Black.
Features: Flight [Free, Avian]
Suit AI: Combat [10]
User Interface: Brain Harness [10]

HUD

Suit Status [0]
Advanced Suit Status [5]
Hawkeye [Free, Avian]
Night Vision [Free, Avian]
Radar [10]

Comms

Radio Transmission
Terminal [10]

Weapons

Particle Beam [15]

Defenses

Light Shield x2 [10]

Shield Links

Armor Plates

Drones

Light (Laser Rifle, Grenade Launcher) [5]
Scout [5]

Drone Upgrades

Scout: Spotter [5]

Upgrades

Environmental Controls II [10]
Capacitor [20]
Camouflage [Free, Mesh]
Collapsible II (Bracelet) [10]
Storage [0]
Cyber Brain [10]
Memory Palace [5]
Polyglot [5]
Veteran Soul [5]
Uplift [10]
Kinetic Stabilizers (+1 Speed) [10]
Maneuvering Jets (+1 Dexterity) [10]

Nanites

Canvas II [10]
Hydra II [20]
Mycelium I [10]
Progenitor [10]

Final Stats

Dexterity (+1 Maneuvering Jets): 6
Durability (+1 Armor Plates): 2 (Avian Form: 1)
Power (+6 Capacitor): 7
Recovery: 5
Speed (+1 Kinetic Stabilizer): 3 (Avian Form: 5)
Strength: 1

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Mackenzie Hackworth
---

Mackenzie Hackworth awakes to thunder without rain. His eyes scratch open, and above, through the blear, he sees the overcast is tainted by drifting wisps. One brick roof to the other, telephone wires crisscross the alley like suspension bridges and for an electric, crash-fueled second the sky is a foggy canal over which he levitates. The sky is down. Mack is up. Anything can happen.

But the moment dies, and the sky rises to where it belongs. And Mack sinks down. On the ground. In trash.

He smells burning. Shit, not again. Garbage bags beneath him crinkle as he jerks upright and beats at his newspaper-stuffed polyester jacket. But he's not on fire. And there's enough smoke that if he were he'd be dead. Clattering aside bottles of Robitussin, he crawls to the edge of his dumpster and peeks over its lip.

The metal egg sits at the end of the alleyway. Wreathed in trash fire, half buried in shattered asphalt and pulsating with cliched green light, the Volkswagen-sized artifact smacks of something out of War of the Worlds--as witnessed by a homeless druggie.

Mack rubs his greasy beard thoughtfully. Psychotic episode? He's certainly had enough of those: ants under the skin, arguing with his dead girlfriend, turning into a werewolf. And there was that crazy zolpidem and salvia trip with the Mashed Potato Monster . . .

He did drink a lot of cough syrup last night, but it must be past noon now. He's down now. Isn't he?

He half climbs, half falls from the dumpster and in a hunched Gollum-gait makes his way towards the strangely beckoning egg. The reek of burning banana peels hits him upside the nose, and he doubles over in wet, wheezing coughs. But as if on their own accord his legs carry him onward until he's kneeling before the alien device, keeping his distance only for the flames.

The egg vents dull vapors along its base which extinguish the flames. A small iris opens in its side and aquamarine laser lights scan him up and down. With an echo of dignity, Mack totters upright and raises his arms as if to say, Here I am.

Whatever happens now, it's not like his life can get any worse . . .

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Mackenzie Hackworth

Chapter One
---

"Would you like more coffee?"

The elf girl waits for no reply but rather pours another mug from the Tupperware pitcher, its lime plastic scuffed from years of birthday parties and picnics and lazy Sunday afternoons when Mack would lounge on the backyard patio after a long day of skateboarding and indulge in a tall glass of raspberry Kool-Aid. It's just as he remembers. All of it: the Texas evening sky, the flimsy wicker chairs, the cracked patio deck, the meticulously mowed lawn and the red brick house that his parents sold years ago.

Beyond the fence, however, the illusion breaks. Like pastoral ruins from a Baroque painting, the neighboring houses are ramshackle derelicts overgrown in vines--a picturesque backdrop. The elf girl's wrong too. He doesn't remember any elf.

He sips his coffee, which has turned to raspberry Kool-Aid. He doesn't mind. The elf girl's a pretty thing, tall and waifish with long black hair that flows over knife ears, framing a thin, sharp-chinned face with pale arctic eyes just a bit too wide to be human. Her green robe is emblazoned with golden runes he almost understands.

Standing across from the round plastic table, she watches with blank anticipation before saying in her calm, even voice, "The surgical procedures are complete. You should wake up soon. Authorities are incoming."

He downs the rest of the mug (the Daffy Duck one, the one that broke when he was twelve). The raspberry flavor tastes like cherry now. Or orange. Or like whatever he thinks about.

"This isn't real," he says. "I'm on a street corner, pacing in a circle and jabbering. If the cops show up, they'll just throw me in the crazy tank again. I'll be out in a couple days. At least I'll get free food and a shower."

"This isn't real," she says, gesturing a thin, white hand around her. "This is a simulated reality generated by your hippocampus implants. But you are not on a street corner. You are not pacing in a circle. You are lying beside the drop pod. The authorities are unlikely to release you. You are no longer human."

"Uh-huh." Mack snorts and shakes his head. The coffee mug is full again. He sips: chocolate milk. "What the hell did I take? Psychotic episodes usually aren't this . . . laid back."

"The nanites have repaired the chemical damage to your brain. Your mental faculties are not impaired." Her face remains impassive, but he can sense urgency in her tone.

"So . . . I should run from the cops, because an elf in a dream told me I'm an alien. Yep, no mental impairment there. I'm a paragon of sanity."

The elf opens her small mouth, but Mack raises a hand and says, "If it's all the same to you, I think I'm going to stay right here. Maybe take a nice long bath in my magic memory-dream-tub. If I'm crazy, I may as well enjoy it while it lasts, right?"

Her expression hardens. He sees, or perhaps senses, an inhuman resolve behind her remote eyes. "No," she says. "There is no time. You will wake up now."

The elf turns to fog, and the patio, the backyard and all the world drains of color and swirls to a nothing gray. Mack falls, screams--

He is lying on his back. He hears sirens. He sits up, expecting to feel the telltale aches of a rough night. But his head is clean, and his limbs are light as feathers, their movements smooth, painless and full of vigor. He bounds his feet and spins, gazes around.

His peripheral has been stretched to a godlike letterbox. The alleyway walls on either side are clear to him, and he can even make out the shutter doors to his rear. He looks at his arms, his body. He is made of mirrors. The tight, interlocking plates, highlighted in black, fashion an impossibly lithe musculature.

I'm a skinny Silver Surfer, he thinks. The sirens grow louder, closer, as if right down the street. Oh, shit.

"Elf girl!" he shouts to the sky in a voice of modulated iron. "Elf girl! Tell me what to do!"

~You must hide. You must flee. I will show you the way.

Thoughts not his own gestate, and he knows.

Outside the alleyway, around the corner, the sirens cry louder. Police vans screech as they brake to a halt. Vehicle doors slide open. Mack looks down as his mercurial body turns first translucent and then vanishes. Invisible wings flare from his back; thruster plates pry open. He feels the tickle of their exhaust against his metal thighs.

Mack spares a moment to look at the now eviscerated egg. Embedded in the asphalt crater, its metal skin is peeled and splayed flowerlike, the internal components consumed, leaving behind only a gray metallic goo. This is where my previous life ends, he thinks, where my new life begins.

The SWAT team appear at the mouth of the alley. Swaddled in body armor, assault rifles at the ready, they stalk forward like a pack of nervous wolves. One pauses and points at the egg, and then at the heat-shimmered air of Mack's thrusters. They hesitate. Though no one can see him, Mack raises up his fists in a pantomime of Superman's up, up and away.

And he blasts off.

The alleyway recedes beneath him, shrinks into the labyrinthine expanse of Sheepshead Bay. He is flying. Like a superhero. Racing-yet-calm, distant-yet-immanent, never has he felt so clear.

This is real. This is really happening.

~Yes, Mack, this is real.

Behind his metal face, Mack grins. This is my second chance, isn't it?

~If you choose to interpret it that way.

The g-forces exhilarate. His heart beats yet he does not breath. There is no need. Trickled thoughts like demon murmurs churn his depths. As he accelerates further into the afternoon sky, his wings rolling him gently, he thinks, You said I'm no longer human.

~That is true, the elf girl replies. He can see her in the corner of his mind.

Then what am I?

~You are more.

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Mackenzie Hackworth
----
Chapter Two

Invisible hands rummage through the teller's drawer. Were anyone nearby to watch, they would see twenties, fifties and hundreds crinkle midair before passing an unseen boundary and vanishing from sight. Mack giggles giddily at the magic trick, but he has no audience. Like almost everywhere else on 34th Street, the Wells Fargo is abandoned.

A few rampaging robots, and everyone bugs out. But Mack wouldn't have it any other way. His new suit comes with many pockets, and he's been putting them to good use. He moves to the last booth. Like the others, the register's locked, and so he jimmies it open with his wrist's utility knife to reveal a surprising stash of Ben Franklins. Mack stuffs them into his abdominal pouches, which seal with a silent click.

Already has he hit the Chase across the street, though, like here, the haul was disappointingly meager. Apparently banks don't like leaving too much cash in their tills, and while the elf girl assured him his particle beam rifle could penetrate the vault doors, that seems like way too much effort. He's not a greedy man. Forty grand is enough. For now, anyway.

Before Mack reaches the entrance, he steps aside to allow two ski-masked gentlemen lurk through the saw-toothed portals that used to be revolving doors. They pass close enough for the black trash bags in their hands to drag across his boots, but neither so much as glances in his direction.

"Shit, looks like someone beat us to it," one says.

"Maybe they didn't get everything," says the other.

As Mack makes his exit, he sees one turn at the sound of crunching glass.

"What was that?" asks the soon to be disappointed looter, but Mack is gone.

He's been here often, on more mundane days. Now, drifting smoke makes a grimy fog of the street. Shattered storefronts gaze out like blinded eyes. Even through his respirator he can smell the acrid stink of burning fuel.

Straggler pedestrians run by in a quick trickle, some racing headlong, others stalling fitfully to look back at the carnage behind them. But they move always south, always away. A young couple, faces striped with soot and tears, carry between them an old lady by as she moans like a dying cow. For a moment Mack moves to help but stops himself. They've got it covered.

What vehicles that could have already evacuated, though a handful of wrecks block the sidewalks and clutter the intersections. On the corner of 34th and Madison splays the ragdoll of a police officer pinned between a taxi and a delivery van. Farther north, closer to 5th Avenue, a crashed helicopter and a cluster of burning army trucks effectively barricade the approach to the Empire State Building. Smoldering flames still crawl out the many rocket strikes that scar the famous skyscraper, but from the tall, arching sprays of water dousing the more fiery wounds, Mack knows the immediate danger has passed. Either the National Guard won or the giant robo-turtle grew bored and flew away.

All's well that ends well.

A brief stroll from Wells Fargo takes Mack to a Dunkin Donuts. Going by just its appearance, one wouldn't know there was a warzone a stone's throw away. The windows aren't smashed, and though the door's open, the glass counter display remains intact and fully stocked. When the shit's hit the fan and robotic daikaiju walk the Earth, who has time to loot pastries?

Mack pours a cup of coffee, grabs a fresh baked platter and sits at one of the booths. Retracting his helmet's mask, he becomes a disembodied face devouring a floating apple fritter. In the warped tin of the napkin dispenser he catches his reflection and nearly recognizes what he sees. But the features are far too lean and severe, the eyes too impossibly emerald. His scraggly hobo beard has shed away, leaving the newly slender jaw baby bare.

He knows what he looks like from his time with the egg, but knowing and seeing are very different things. Almost, he feels regret, but the canvas nanites can change him back if he wants. Oddly enough, he does not, because something inside him that's hard yet beautiful, ancient yet young, tells him he will grow accustomed to this new appearance. This is how people are supposed to look.

But which people?

So, you're an AI, right?

~I am.

Okay, but who made you? Space elves?

~That seems a reasonable hypothesis.

Don't you know? You're one of them.

~I'm one of their creations, but my memory does not include who 'they' are.

Mack sips his coffee and wishes it were hotter. This is probably a game to them. Pass out toys and watch the fuzzy-wuzzies fight.

~According to news sources, there were over eight hundred meteor impacts throughout the New York metropolitan area. Only four pilots are reported as violent.

Did you see that turtle? That dragon? Four is enough.

~Each pilot has explored their new abilities in their own fashion.

Some by going on killing sprees, Mack replies bitterly.

Though he cannot see her, and there is no delay, he feels her hesitation.

~You said this suit was your second chance.

Oh, this was a windfall for me. I won't deny that. But if the elves are the good guys, why didn't they just dump their nanite fairy dust into the atmosphere? Overnight, all diseases are cured, everyone's an elf.

But the elf girl refuses the bait. ~You said this suit was your second chance . . . yet all you've done is steal pieces of green paper.

Mack scowls at his third fritter before biting defiantly. Two hours ago I was sleeping in a dumpster. Bank robbery's a step up.

~But you disapproved of the mechanized turtle's actions. You disapproved, yet did nothing.

Part of him so wanted to blast the turtle with his particle beam rifle--and the elf assured him of a fatal strike--but somehow it didn't seem his place. Wasn't the turtle someone else's problem? Not to mention the personal danger.

I don't like getting involved with things. I guess you can say I'm a wallflower. A wallflower with a cloaking device.

Even in his own mind, the witticism falls flat, and suddenly he aches with the same hollow pain that, until today, was as ubiquitous a misery as the grime that soiled his face. To stave off embarrassment, he elaborates.

I mean, what if I missed? What if the turtle saw me? I'm no hero. It's best to keep low, stay out of trouble, you know? The tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut.

Implied hesitation stretches into genuine silence. The elf is ashamed of him.

~You should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Mack puts down his pastry. An alien computer quoting T. S. Eliot? But then she's in his brain, isn't she? She knows all that he knows. She knows of his skyward dreams and his abysmal plummet. She knows of the black dog days and the cough syrup nights. She knows who he is: not a has-been, but a never-was, an impostor who let the mask slip and gave up all pretense.

And she knows . . .

~Yes, I know of Ama.

Mack's eyes burn, and he suddenly wants nothing more than to gouge fingers through his skull and claw out the violating circuitry.

But he hears a sound. The loud, whooshing chops of rotors distracts his anguish.

Helicopters have been flittering across the city ever since the eggs fell, but these are close and flying low enough to stir the street's trash. Mack steps to the shop's picture windows and tracks the their southward progress. Before they leave his line of sight, he goes outside, lowering his mask to cloak his face.

There are six of them, grouped in a haphazard flock. His vision zooms and steadies. Four are the big kind the army uses--he's seen them in movies. The other two are smaller but saddled with chainguns and rockets.

They stop shortly before a boxy building a short way down 34th. Mack half crosses the street before he can angle a look at the sign: NYU Cancer Center.

Any idea what's going on?

~Their transmissions are encrypted, but I deduce they've tracked a pilot to this location.

Hmm, should be interesting. A diversion, at least. Mack strolls closer along the broad, abandoned sidewalk. Not having pants pockets for his hands is weird, but he's grown used to the ghostly clumsiness of not seeing his own body. He jogs lightly to the wreck of a taxi, climbs on top and sits to watch the spectacle above.

The little choppers fly around the hospital in wide, hungry orbits while two of the bigger ones ascend to the roof. A third disappears around the back.

The fourth hovers near the top story, a hundred feet up, it's sliding door open to reveal a gray-haired man practically leaning out of the cabin as he grips a looped strap. In his other hand is a microphone. A machine gun barrel juts out beside him, covering the windows with anticipatory swivels.

The man raises the mic to his lips.

"ANGEL ZACARIAS! THIS IS SPECIAL AGENT BOYLE OF THE FBI. YOU ARE IN POSSESSION OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. REMOVE THE ARMOR AND STEP ONTO THE ROOF WITH YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD. IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY, WE ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE."

Angel Zacarias. That was that Army lesbian, right? The one who won that medal?

~Correct. Sergeant Zacarias won the Silver Star in 2007. She publicly acknowledged her homosexuality in a 2011 interview. The elf computer projects a Wikipedia page into Mack's visual field. A short-haired young brunette in desert fatigues scowls from her photo.

Huh, so she has a suit too? Small world. He scans the text faster than he ever could before. Looks like her wife has leukemia. That sucks, but now he can guess why she's here. With a thought, he blinks the webpage away. He remembers there was a bit of controversy about her at the time. Something to do with, "Don't ask, don't tell," and the idea that her orientation was a little too loud for the closet.

The helicopter drifts sideways from the building, granting a better view for Mack, who lies back on the taxi's roof, hands behind his head. Absurdly, Agent Boyle wears body armor over a work shirt and tie. Strange goggles cover both his and the machine gunner's eyes.

"YOU'VE SERVED YOUR COUNTRY. YOU'RE A HERO. WE DON'T WANT TO KILL YOU. SURRENDER NOW AND YOU WILL BE UNHARMED."

Agent Boyle looks down, cranes his head. He lifts his goggles, lowers them and points. It seems almost like he's pointing at Mack.

It's not even that dark. Why are they wearing night vision?

Agent Boyle taps the gunner on the shoulder. The gunner looks down as well.

~Ms. Zacarias may have chosen a Mesh-class suit similar to yours. If she did, and the FBI are aware of its stealth capabilities, they are likely equipped with thermal vision.

Still watching the ground, the gunner now lifts his goggles, lowers them.

Like out of the movie, Predator?

~Yes. Despite hyper-dimensional venting, suits radiate significant heat.

Agent Boyle points again, shouts something Mack can't make out.

Which means . . .

The gunner aims at Mack.

~They can see you.

Mack rolls off the taxi's roof and runs. Even with his augmented reflexes, he still feels the muffled blows as piercing gunfire pings off his back armor. Hornets string his legs; a hammer bang his helmet. His cloaking field flickers, blinking his mirrored suit in and out of existence before giving up the ghost. Behind him, in his extended peripheral, one of the smaller helicopters sweeps from around a corner.

~Light damage to armor. Take cover immediately.

Racing past closed roller doors, he reaches a wide picture window which he leaps through in a shower of glass and Venetian blinds. Tripping over plastic chairs, he sprawls across a hospital waiting room. Bullets from above blast the chairs to splinters, gouge into the tile floor. Patients, families and staff cower and cry. Several point at Mack, the shimmering demon, and scream bloody murder.

Mack only has enough time to stand before four men in full SWAT gear storm through the double doors across the room. They don't threaten. They don't hesitate. They just shoot.

Crossing arms over his face, he cries out as assault rifle fire craters painfully across his silver hide. A spiderweb of cracks sprouts across the right side of his vision. He turns back towards the smashed window.

~No, don't go outside!

He goes outside. Agent Boyle's helicopter hasn't forgotten about him and opens fire as soon as he clears the building. The smaller chopper joins the fun with the deafening buzz-saw of chainguns. Mack charges through the gauntlet of lead, over the sidewalk and across the street. Bullets ricochet off the pavement like rain. The smaller chopper lets loose a long, skinny rocket, and an explosion of heat and flame knocks Mack to the ground.

Somehow, he finds his feet, keeping moving. His side hurts, feels wet. He right arm is numb. His left knee doesn't bend right. His shiny suit lurches with spasms as it dies from a million metallic dings.

~You have a shield. Use it! Retreat to the hospital!

Screw that! I need to get out of here!

Still trying to run, he swivels open his engine plates and folds out his wings.

~No! You're too damaged!

Mack blasts off. Everything is fine until he's twenty feet up. Then he feels a wing snap, and the thrusters along his left side short out. He is spinning, he is turning. Gunfire strafes him from all sides as he flaps his remaining wing in futile compensation. Somehow, he soars upward before crashing through a window near the top floor of the hospital.

He jets across a room, through a door and into a wall. Amid a heap of smashed wood and sheetrock, Mack shakes his head groggily and tries to tease addled limbs into action. His armor looks as if it'd been gang-raped by jackhammers. His visor is a jig-zaw of cracks. Dimly, he is aware of an old woman crying from the floor beside her bed, but this sound is drowned by the rush of incoming rotors.

Mack hobbles arthritically to his feet. The smaller helicopter swings into view through the glass-toothed jaws of the window. Looking for all the world like some giant chimera insect, its twin chainguns are mandibles, its rocket pods stubby claws. Dragging shredded wings behind him, Mack stumbles down the hall and out of sight just as the air screams with staccato gunfire.

~Mack, says the elf in his brain. You're an idiot.

To be continued . . .

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Name: Angel Zacarias
Gender: Female
Age: 30

Appearance: Tall, lanky and tough. Muscular in a wiry way. Rocks a pompadour. Likes to wear ragged jeans, flannel shirts, tank tops. Has an Military Police Corps tattoo on her left bicep. Her face is youthful, though the smoking and drinking are beginning to take their toll.

Personality: Moody. Little things set her off. Has a record of domestic violence, though not recently. Has largely overcome her PTSD, though she still has bad moments. Takes pride in her Army service. A hands on person. Loves bowhunting and working on cars. Loves her wife.

Doesn't know to deal with her wife's terminal illness. Lack of support from her family has left her bitter. Currently feels helpless, desperate.

Character History: Enlisted in the army right out of high school. Deployed to Iraq. In 2007 received the Silver Star for her actions during an enemy ambush on a convoy outside Abu Ghraib. After returning home she entered and dropped out of college, married her girlfriend and worked a series of odd jobs before settling as an auto mechanic. As a hobby, she hunts deer and fixes up old cars.

A few months ago her wife was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The prognosis is not good. Financial problems only make it worse, and her estranged parents won't help at all.

Her life seems in a flat spin, but then one day she's driving down a back road when a small meteor crashes in front of her '73 Oldsmobile . . .

Name: Phoenix Wraith
Class: Mesh
Body: Avian/Hunter [60]
Colors: Black withviolet highlights.
Features: Flight [Free, Avian]

Suit AI: Combat [10]
User Interface: Nerve Suit [5]

HUD

Advanced Suit Status [5]
Hawkeye [Free, Avian]
Night Vision [Free, Avian]
Thermal Vision [Free, Hunter]
Radar [Free, Hunter]

Comms

Terminal [10]

Weapons

Pulse Rifle [10]
Plasma Bow [20]

Defenses

Light Shield x2 [10]

Shield Links

Armor Plates

Drones

Light x3 (Particle Beam, RPG, Autocannon) [15]
Scout [5]

Drone Upgrades

Light: Airstorm [15]
Scout: Spotter [5]

Upgrades

Environmental Controls III [Free, Hunter]
Capacitor [20]
Collapsible II [10]
Camouflage [Free, Mesh]
Uplift [10]
Kinetic Stabilizers [10]
Maneuvering Rockets [10]

Nanites

Hydra II [20]

Final Stats:

Dexterity (+1 Maneuvering Rockets): Avian Form: 6 / Hunter Form: 9
Durability (+1 Armor Plates): Avian Form: 1 / Hunter Form: 2
Power (+6 Capacitor): Avian Form: 7 / Hunter Form: 1
Recovery: 5
Speed (+1 Kinetic Stabilizer): Avian Form: 5 / Hunter Form: 3
Strength: 1

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Angel Zacarias

Prologue
---

"I'm sorry, but our policies haven't changed," the woman said. "We've never covered Trexall. We did cover Albitrexate, but they discontinued that, so . . ."

"They're the same fucking drugs!" Angel snapped as her '73 Cutlass growled down a sunny wetland stretch of King George Road. Warm autumn wind buffeted through the rolled-down windows to mess her pompadour and blast her tears. The wheel trembled under her shaking hand; her other squeezed the phone so hard she swore the screen would shatter against her cheek. She took a deep breath--from her diaphragm, just like her therapist taught her.

Angel eased off the accelerator and exhaled slowly before explaining through gritted teeth, "I've researched them. They're the same chemical."

"Yes, I know," the woman said placatingly, as if acknowledging the absurdity would make her client feel better. "But not according to the patent office . . ."

Angel closed her eyes with exasperation. Not smart when driving. "So, she has to stop her chemo because a scrap of paper in a file drawer says two things the same are actually different? Does that sound right to you?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but there's nothing I can do. We can cover Clofarex--"

"She doesn't need Clofarex!" Angel nearly shouted. The sting behind her eyes let loose, and she had to fight back a sob. "'Trexate was working! Clofarex wasn't! What about that can't you get through your fat, stupid head? Your company is killing my wife!"

"I'm sorry you feel that way. I wish I could--" In the background, a man's voice interrupted the woman. Angel couldn't make out the words, but he sounded excited. "Oh, my god!" someone cried.

"Ms. Zacarias," the woman said blankly "I think you should check the news. Now."

The call dropped. Angel screamed and threw the phone into the passenger floorboards. Her car briefly fishtailed until she steadied the wheel with both hands.

Tears ran freely now. She knew she should pull over, but instead she put pedal to the metal and raced the Cutlass from eighty to ninety and beyond. Trees and shrubs slipped by in a leafy blur that made a forest corridor of the lonesome highway. If only the road rolled forever; if only she could drive and never stop. But then Angel and Carin's life seemed typified by the impotence of 'if.'

If only Carin hadn't gotten sick. If only the Reserve hadn't discharged me. If only we weren't crippled with debts. If only my parents weren't selfish assholes.

She hadn't called them in months, and that last time only her mother would speak to her.

"Sweetie, I think this is God's way of telling you you're on the wrong path."

"So, God gave my wife leukemia to teach me a lesson?"

Angel had said some choice, bridge-nuking words after that and never looked back. She knew the truth: they just didn't want their lesbian daughter's wife to drain their retirement fund.

But now Carin had it in her spinal cord, and doctors gave her a 30% chance--provided she continued the chemo. The online donations funded part of that, and Angel's minor celebrity status helped bring it in. But despite the novelty of her gender and sexual orientation, that Silver Star was seven years old. 'Has-been war hero' didn't exactly open wallets.

Angel sniffled, wiped her eyes. Sometimes controlled breathing and thinking things through helped keep the attacks down, even if things weren't any better afterwards. From her flannel jacket she tugged loose a cigarette and drew deeply as she lit. She was going to see Carin this evening at Cancer NYU, but she should give her a call now, assuming she wasn't too wonky. As she leaned down for the phone, she idly wondered why the insurance lady hung up on her.

The fireball struck.

The explosion was down the road, a few hundred meters away, but Angel was still driving way too fast.

Most people would slam the brakes and jerk the wheel, but if she did that the car would roll over a half dozen times. Instead she tapped and swerved gently left, and the Cutlass plowed into the expanding debris cloud but missed the round boulder that blocked half the two-lane highway.

But the car bottomed out against a pothole or a crater and rebounded into the air and for a moment Angel was no longer driving an Oldsmobile in New Jersey but a Humvee outside Abu Ghraib.

She hears gunfire and feels blood on her face and sees the truck in front of her flip in the air from the IED. The Humvee sinks to the side and crashes to a halt, smashing her back and forth. She can't see for all the blood and dust and frantically looks for her M4 carbine but it's nowhere and everything looks wrong. She listens: grit like BB pellets tap dance on the windshield, but the gunfire's gone and Anders is missing from her seat.

Because she's been dead seven years.

Angel spent a trembling, wind-down minute before wiping the blood from her eyes, her mouth, her chin. Gathering her wits, she stared dumbfounded at the droplets spangling her white tank-top. The Cutlass had slid off the shoulder to crash at a 45o tilt into a wet ditch, and now tall grass and mosquitoes intruded through the rolled-down diver's side. She slapped at a bite and tried to open the door, but of course mud blocked the way.

She climbed up and out the passenger door instead, pausing on the way to retrieve her phone from the floorboard's driveshaft hump. The short drop to the pavement left her lanky legs wobbly, but aside from a few bruises, a nasty gash on her forehead and the inevitable whiplash, she judged she was okay. Shame about the car, though. She snapped its picture, the uplifted undercarriage exposing the bent axle and trashed engine.

As she limped the hundred or so meters to the smoking impact site, she noted the highway was still devoid of traffic. Did they name meteors like they did asteroids? If so, she saw it first, so it was hers to name. She'd let Carin have the honors, though. Maybe the media story would bring in donations.

By the time she reached the splintered, asphalt crater, the smoke had mostly cleared. The rock was gray, egg-shaped and polish smooth. She always thought asteroids were rough and bumpy. But then, she wasn't an astronomer. She snapped another picture and sent both to Carin: hey babe look what this meteor did to my cutlass! omg its looks like a space egg wtf!

The space egg then fizzled and cracked, and its skin flaked away like dried mud in an Arizona windstorm. Angel stepped back, her army boots tripping on a jag of road. She fell on her butt. Beneath the outer coating the meteor glowed an unearthly green that made her think of an R-rated cartoon movie from the eighties.

A tiny hole opened, and an eerie blue light shone upon her face. Angel couldn't move. Something cold and intangible slithered through her eyes, and she felt alien stirrings. She screamed in silence.

A female voice, soft and monotone, spoke from nowhere.

~New pilot accepted. Please allocate resources for armor module.

Who are you? Angel thought.

~Please allocate resources for armor module. Images of various robots and weaponry ran through her mind. She saw schematics, specifications. Somehow, they all made terrible sense.

This is insane. I have a concussion.

~Please allocate resources for armor module. A rendering of Angel's own face floated before her, rotating back and forth before elongating beyond what was acceptably human. Her chin sharpened. Her eyes slanted. Her ears sprouted points.

No, I don't want to be a fucking elf!

~The appearance is variable. There are other options. We can augment your organic neural network, store your mind state for later retrieval. She saw the map of a brain, burrowed into an ant colony by a web of lace-thin worms.

No! Don't you drill into my brain!

~We can upgrade your nutritional requir--

NO!

~We can implant memories into--

HELL NO!

~We can inject you with nanites which--

NO! NO! NO!

~--will regenerate damage--

NO! FUCKING NO!

~--and cure diseases.

Wait, what?

~The hydranites are nanoscale--

Shut up and tell me: Can they cure cancer?

----
To be continued.

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Angel Zacarias
---
Chapter One

Angel awoke to the upturned bowl of an orange afternoon sky. Trees, grass and shattered asphalt framed the impossible stretch of her peripheral. Against her face the air felt tepid, smelled sterile. Sounds of breathing crackled in her ears. She was wearing a helmet, a helmet with a vision-expanding visor.

Like ice water in the face, it all came back as she sat up: the car wreck, the green glowing meteor, the blue light, the voice, the promise. Angel stood. She wore a skintight outfit, jet black with purple lines that gave definition to the cuirass and spaulders and other armored plates which contoured to her lanky frame. It made her think of one Carin's video games.

She looked at the garage-wide crater. The meteor had peeled down to a thin metal wrapper splattered with a silvery slime.

"So it was real," she said dully.

"Yes. Authorities are incoming," said the female voice. In her ear now and not her head.

"Authorities?"

"New Jersey State Police. SWAT units. Helicopter's ETA: three minutes, forty seconds. Ground vehicles' ETA: ten minutes, thirty seconds. Estimated strength: one twelve person squad, lightly arm--"

"Okay, okay," Angel said, raising a palm to no one. "But that's good, right? They're the police, not the bad guys. I'll just take this off and say, 'look what I found!' I haven't done anything wrong. You said these . . . hydro-nabites or whatever . . . you said they're"--she winced--"inside me, right? All I have to do is touch Carin for a while, and she'll be well."

"That is correct: prolonged exposure will eradicate the cancerous cells. But the police will not allow this contact. They are under orders to detain anyone potentially compromised by alien technology."

Angel practiced walking. The suit weighed nothing, and she felt stronger, faster. Her headache was gone, as were all the bruises from the crash. She had been given so many options; she tried to remember.

"This suit can fly, right?"

"Yes."

"And turn invisible?"

"Along the visible and infrared spectrum, yes."

Angel looked at the sky. She thought she heard rotors in the distance. "Well, I guess what the police don't know won't hurt them," she said. She flexed her gloved fists experimentally. "How do I use these powers?"

"Concentrate on the desired action. The nerve suit will convey the command."

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was a disembodied point of view hovering at eye level. She held her arms out before her but saw only the asphalt and wetlands of her surroundings.

"Groovy," Angel said. But now . . .

Almost before she had completed the thought, she felt thin dragonfly wings sprout from her spine-plate. Small engine vents swiveled out along her thighs and the small of her back, and the rockets tickled with heat.

And she was flying.

The road shrank to a long gray snake, and she swerved east in a victory roll high over the heavy wooded sprawl of Passaic River Park. Her HUD gave altitude and speed, and highlighted along her new peripheral the dot of an incoming police helicopter. Too bad for them because they were late to the party.

She spread her arms, threw back her wings and raced up, up and away.

I'm flying an alien suit that gives me superpowers. The unreality of it brought laughter which rang against her faceplate. This was like that old TV show she watched reruns of as a girl. How did that theme song go?

"Believe it or not, I'm walking on air . . ."

She was dizzying herself with 300mph flip-kicks at 20,000 feet when something under her suit, in her jeans pocket, began to vibrate.

"How the hell am I supposed to answer that?" Angel demanded.

"I can link it through the suit's comms system."

"Do it."

"Angie," said Carin's weak, sleepy voice. "I . . . I got your text. You were . . . you were hit by a meteor?"

"Yeah, babe, but that's not the half of it." Angel laughed. "If I tell you over the phone you'll think I'm shitting you, but I got a some good news."

"But the car . . ."

"The Cutlass is dead, baby. Forget about it. But don't worry. I've got it all under control."

"But--"

"Look, didn't I always say I'd take care of you?"

"Yeah, but--"

"I love you, baby."

"I love you too, Angie, but--"

"See you in a few."

Somehow, Angel cut the call with a thought. She folded her wings into a skinny 'V' and dived before leveling in a smooth northeast flight. She'd been in airplanes before, but this experience was more vast, more immediate. Through nearly panoramic eyes, the street-sewed patchwork of residential Newark spread before her like a surburban ocean. Past the green-gray waters of the Hackensack lay Jersey City, and beyond that, across the Hudson River sat the Big Apple herself.

She was a mile or so above the Goldman Sachs Tower when she saw the explosions.

In the skyscraper's parking lot a gargantuan robotic gorilla was flinging cars as if they were Hot Wheels while a seemingly neverending rocket barrage fired wildly from its shoulder pods. Police helicopters circled from a cautious distance, their open side doors ablaze with muzzle flashes. Angel zoomed in and saw burning wreckage, charred bodies; she strangled the memories before they awoke. The ape's red eyes burned like torches. It kicked a bus and beat great metal fists against its armored chest. Its hinged jaws bellowed an electronically modulated "Tarzan call" that, despite the heavy amplification, sounded suspiciously like that of a teenage boy.

"I take it mine wasn't the only meteor?" Angel said with forced dryness. From so far up, even the giant machine seemed only a sort of action figure brought to life. But already new fears were brewing.

"Evidently not," the voice replied. "I'm receiving news reports regarding numerous attacks throughout the New York metropolitan area."

Along the building's side, windows shattered and floors sank as the robo-simian began its King Kong climb.

"Who are you people?" asked Angel, her anger sounding only frightened to her ears. "Why are you handing out free mechs?"

"I am a creation of the elven race. I don't know why."

"I don't believe you," Angel said.

When she had accepted the voice's offer, she wanted only the magical, all-healing Hydra-bites. That's all she needed. But the voice insisted she allocate the other "resources," and it really pushed for the "elf-makeover" and "cyber-brain" options, both of which Angel flatly refused. There had been different mech classes to choose from, but the human-sized model with the cloaking ability seemed a lot less conspicuous than the ones twenty stories tall.

But it seemed some wanted to be conspicuous--and homicidal--and the elves apparently had no problem with that. An hour ago she didn't know they existed, but their strategy seemed clear: distribute dangerous technology, let the humans kill each other. Next phase: invasion.

She spotted a C-130-sized silver dragon flapping around the Statue of Liberty. Rockets belched from its wings, and with a final lash of its tail it snapped off the Lady's torch hand before blasting off into the sunset sky.

"Beware elves bearing mechs," said Angel.

Gliding in a slow, spiraling circle around the Goldman Sachs Tower, Angel considered drawing her "plasma bow" and putting down the mad gorilla . . . until a more intimate concern took hold.

Thrusting to about 10,000 feet, she turned towards the Manhattan skyline. "Show me the Cancer NYU."

Adjusting for the dim light, the cluttered, bird's eye view zoomed upon a single cubist building unremarkable from its companions. Angel scanned the surrounding streets. The Empire State Building looked like it was kind of on fire, but that was several blocks away.

Her computer anticipated her question. "There are no reports of attacks near the New York University Cancer Center."

Angel was already thrusting across the Hudson. "Yeah, but how long will that last? Thanks to your elven masters, New York's become a robot war zone."

"Thanks to my elven masters, your wife will live."

"Are you getting smart with me?"

"I am more intelligent than you, so yes."

Angel didn't bother with a comeback. "Shut up and call Carin."

No ring, then: "You have called the voice mail box of: 'Carin Yovanovitch.'"

Shit.

Down a steep, accelerating curve, Angel swooped over the steel and glass jungle of Lower Manhattan. The cumulative honks of a million-strong traffic-jam blared up like an acoustic aura jingled with sirens, and though the streets and avenues breezed by too fast for details, she saw most were clogged with vehicles and crowds, wrecks and fires.

She yawed herself feet-first, fired her thrusters and used her wings as airbrakes. By the time she touched down on the hospital's white-pebbled rooftop, the impact was no greater than if she'd jumped off a stepladder. She willed her wings to retract and felt the vague shift as they folded into the spine.

Nestled behind the skyscraper horizon, the sun shone as but a violet suggestion that, through Angel's light-enhanced visor, left the cityscape a hazy, electric dream. A steel turtle the size of a yacht soared past the Empire State Building, whose brick and glass hide gaped with black, smoldering wounds. Helicopters raced in the distance, though one hovered closer than the others, as if it were searching. Tiny rocks crunched beneath Angel's invisible boots as she stepped to the roof's ledge and realized that whatever happened today, the world had changed; it was not going to change back.

She shook the thoughts away and jogged to the roof's access door. She was surprised to find it unlocked. After descending two flights of stairs to the door of the floor of Carin's usual infusion room, Angel stopped. There would be people on the other side. Walking amongst them as a unseen ghost would be weird.

"How do I take this thing off?" she asked.

"Concentrate on collapsing it."

She remembered choosing that option. She'd wondered what it meant. With the metallic flap of aluminum butterflies, the cloaked suit receded back like a wave, and Angel could once more see her body. To an outsider, it would look like she had just folded into existence.

Angel stared at the shiny black bracelet now clasped to her left wrist. It felt smooth like obsidian, and as she peered closer she saw there were hair-fine bands of purple which seemed to jiggle under the stairway's florescent lights.

"How could all that fit in . . .?"

"Ten dimensional storage," the elven computer replied, somehow still speaking in her ear. "The physics you wouldn't understand."

"Like a Tardis," Angel said. Carin loved that silly show.

Angel buttoned her flannel jacket to hide the blood on her tanktop and stepped through the door into the hospital corridor. No one noticed.

A harried-looking security guard nearly bumped into her as he jogged past. Through an open door, an old bedridden woman held hands in a circle with her family, their eyes shut in intense prayer. By the service desk, a small, somber crowd of patients and staff were gathered around a wall-mounted flatscreen which showed a cute blond news-anchor speaking excitably while images of the newly-maimed Statue of Liberty played behind her.

"Evacuate?" someone from around the hall cried. "Yeah, that went real well in New Orleans . . ."

Given the local attitude, Angel half-expected the lights to flicker, but they shone with the usual sterile brightness that so complimented the pallid, antiseptic smell that all hospitals shared. She hated this place.

Dr. Ison walked by, his head bent over the tablet in his hand. He pecked at it irritably.

"Hey, is Carin . . .?" Angel began.

He gestured down the hall without looking up. "Yeah, she's still in the chair, I guess."

He guessed right. When Angel stepped into the 7-A chemotherapy infusion room, her wife was leaned back in a padded recliner. The other seats were empty.

Carin's left hand was taped with a IV line, her right fiddled with her phone. With a sad, frustrated scowl lining her delicate features, she glanced up lazily and actually did a double-take.

"Angie! Oh, my god. I was so worried!"

Angel was going to kneel by her side, but her wife stood to embrace her. Carin had always been on the petite side, but after weeks of chemo her previously snug Tegan and Sara shirt hung baggy on her shoulders; through the thin cotton Angel's hands felt only skin and ribs. She stroked the bandanna hiding Carin's bald scalp and kissed her. Angel would sooner cut out her own tongue than tell her, but she tasted of death.

But hopefully not for much longer.

Carin pushed away, her gray eyes almost wild with inquisitiveness. "How did you get here so fast? They say the traffic's blocked, and your car . . ." She trailed off and shook her head. "The internet and phones are out, and the news only says there's 'attacks.' What's going on?"

"Space elves, baby," Angel said. "They dropped a bunch of meteors full of anime robot shit. Some folks are just being assholes about it. But hey, that's the bad news. The good news is I snagged one of them suits--and it comes with some awesome health care."

Carin looked like she'd been slapped. "Are you trying to be funny? This is serious." She pointed out the window. "Did you see the Empire State Building?"

"Forget the Empire State Building. I've got it all under control. Look, I'll prove my bona fides." Angel closed the door. Holding up her left fist, she willed the action and shouted, "Go-go-gadget cybersuit!"

From the bracelet, the black and violet armor flapped into place around her, its movements so precise yet mechanically impossible as to seem computer generated. The interlocking plates gave a tight hug as they fastened and locked.

Angel flexed a bicep. "What do you think?" she said, her voice now slightly modulated. "A little too 'Power Rangers,' maybe, but I like the color scheme."

"I see," Carin said, nodding slowly. "The cancer's finally reached my brain."

"No, it ain't like that," Angel began. "I know this seems crazy, but--"

"Authorities are incoming," the elf computer said.

"Incoming? What, you mean here?" Angel asked.

"Six FBI helicopters are converging on this hospital. ETA less than one minute."

"But why here?"

"Angie, who are you talking to?"

Angel raised a gloved hand to shush her wife as the computer said, "Their transmissions are encrypted, but from what I can deduce they are looking for you."

"Me? How did they know--" But then she remembered the wrecked car, the text, the phone calls. "Shit. But half the city's overrun with giant fucking robots. Why the hell are they bothering with me?"

"The National Guard is engaging with the dangerous targets. The FBI has likely been tasked with capturing a suit, and they knew you would come here. Evidently you arrived before they could prepare an ambush, but they were likely monitoring the building, probably through thermal vision."

Angel could hear rotors now, thrumming louder by the second. Pulling Carin with her, she leaned behind a wall and through her expanded peripheral peeked out the window. A lumbering Black Hawk roared by, followed shortly by a Little Bird. Like a dragonfly of war, the smaller helicopter bristled with miniguns and rocket pods. Angel pulled back from sight.

"Shit!" she hissed. Others buzzed past, though one hovered nearby. Suddenly the lights went out. The air conditioning ticked a few times as it lost its hum.

"ANGEL ZACARIAS!" megaphoned a voice from outside, mispronouncing her name. "THIS IS SPECIAL AGENT BOYLE OF THE FBI. YOU ARE IN POSSESSION OF HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. REMOVE THE ARMOR AND STEP ONTO THE ROOF WITH YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD. IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY, WE ARE AUTHORIZED TO USE DEADLY FORCE."

A searchlight shone through the window, casting the vertical blinds as barred silhouettes. Angel held her wife closer and inched to the corner of the room, dragging the IV stand with them. Trembling, Carin hugged the armored plates on Angel's chest and said, "This can't be happening. This can't be happening . . ."

"Elf," Angel whispered. "Have those hydro-bots cured Carin yet?"

"No. A full eradication will require at least two days of frequent physical contact."

"Which she won't get if I turn myself in."

"Correct. You are contaminated with alien technology. You will likely be detained indefinitely. Your wife may be as well."

Something was always inside Angel, sometimes slumbering, sometimes stirring. It screamed, on occasion, but hadn't been fully awake since that shattered morning outside Abu Ghraib. But it was awake now. It's heart beat with stone fear, cool anger.

Even through two floors Angel heard the heavy windstorm of what must be multiple Black Hawks congregating over the roof. She could even hear the rushing patter of boots landing, running.

Roughly, Angel pulled Carin down with her in a crouch. When customizing her suit, she had chosen certain weapons, and she thought of one now. As if by magic the stocky pulse carbine folded out from her back and slid down her right arm to her outstretched hand.

Through weird, light-enhanced sight Carin's weeping face looked too much like a skull. "I . . . I don't know what's going on, but please, just give up! I don't want to lose you!"

Angel looked at Carin and smiled, though she knew all her wife saw was the smooth dark faceplate of a motorcycle helmet. They'd both been through so much shit, but especially Carin. She'd survived her dad's belt, the foster homes, her boyfriend's fists. And her girlfriend's PTSD. And then when life turns around and she's found happiness and is about to publish her first book and they can dare to plan their future together. . . she gets knocked down with leukemia.

And now there was a way out. But the door was closing.

The carbine was about the size of a M4. It felt like an old friend. And she had her "plasma bow" too. Deer, Feds: what's the difference?

"Don't worry, baby," Angel said as she turned invisible. "I got everything under control."

To be continued . . .

JMHthe3rd · Oct 30, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Angel Zacarias
---
Chapter Two

"YOU'VE SERVED YOUR COUNTRY. YOU'RE A HERO. WE DON'T WANT TO KILL YOU. SURRENDER NOW AND YOU WILL BE UNHARMED," echoed the megaphoned voice through the walls.

"This isn't happening," Carin said for the seventh time.

Gripping her wife's frail arm with an invisible hand, Angel led her down a windowless corridor of the NYU Cancer Center. Night vision made sepia of the darkness and red emergency lights. Whispers and weeping drifted from occupied rooms.

Carin rubbed at her wrist where the IV had been and looked around with scared puppy eyes too big for her emaciated features. Angel could feel her tremble and had to stop herself from holding her, kissing her and stroking her big, bald bandannaed head.

"I'm probably having a seizure right now. Or I'm dead and my brain's throwing it's last hurrah. I mean, aliens, magic mecha suits?" Carin's titter sounded more like a sob. "Occam's Razor makes short work of that."

Who the fuck is Occam? Angel thought, finding the term vaguely familiar. Something to do with philosophy. For an English Lit major, Carin sure knew a lot about everything.

"No, babe, you're thinking about it too much," Angel said. "Look at the Aztecs. They were cutting out hearts on pyramids or whatever when one day the Spanish sail up and say 'Hey, some dude was nailed to a tree for your sins. Give us gold.' I bet there was a whole lot of, 'Who are these pale faces? Holy shit! This can't be happening! This can't be happening . . .' And look what happened to them."

Angel stopped by an open bedroom--a good a place to hide her as any--and turned Carin to face her. Carin flinched as unseen fingers' brushed her cheek. The HUD rendered the cloaked hand, along with the rest of her body, in violet wire-frame.

"This is all kinds of crazy, I know," Angel said. "But the crazy's real. And if we're going to survive, we better keep our heads on and our eyes open"

"Behind you," the elf said.

A light swung from around the corner. Angel reached for the pulse carbine dangling by its strap, but it was only a hospital security guard. She'd seen the fat bullfrog of a man before, swaggering down the halls. His hand hovered near his holster.

"Ms. Yovanovitch," the guard said, frowning with surprise. He shined the flashlight in Carin's face, then wobbled it in a search. The beam passed through Angel effortlessly.

Carin froze like a frightened doe. Her eyes kept darting where she thought Angel stood.

"I thought I heard someone else," the guard said. When she gave no reply, he went on, "I think a SWAT team landed on the roof. I don't know what's going on with your, uh, girlfriend, but until this all gets straightened out, I think you should come with me. For your own safety."

Carin was shaking now. Tears broke past twitchy blinks. "I . . ." she began.

Outside: gunfire.

Reflex made the guard draw his weapon. Angel struck.

She'd learned combatives in the army, mostly grapples and escapes, with a few quick and dirty moves. Later, she and Carin had taken jujutsu classes, which taught various locks, chokes and throws.

Angel used none of that. She grabbed and snapped his wrist and then punched him in the head until he fell. And kept on punching. That her suit augmented her strength certainly helped. That she was also invisible didn't hurt.

"Stop it! Stop it!" Carin cried, backing away from the poltergeist blows. Angel climbed to her feet. Her balled fists tingled; her helmeted breath echoed in her ears. His face was a mess, but he looked alive enough. With sudden shame she remembered the night Carin locked herself in the bathroom and called the cops. But that was a long time ago. Angel wasn't that person anymore.

An explosion faintly tremored the floor.

Attaching the pistol to a side pouch, Angel gripped her wife's elbow and dragged her around the corner. From the floor above, she heard a crash of glass and masonry. A few seconds later came the continuous ear-piercing spits that could only be miniguns.

Carin crouched so low she nearly curled into a ball, her whimpers drowned by the buzz-sawing fire. Angel didn't have time for this; she slung her in a fireman's carry and ran as fast as she could down the hall. Over the shooting, bullets chewed loudly through wood and drywall. Screams sounded through the ceiling.

"What the fuck? They're shooting into a hospital!" Angel cried.

"They may have encountered another Suit," said the elf.

"But . . . they're the FBI. And they're shooting into a hospital!"

"There's a media blackout. The Web is censored," the elf explained. "They can act with impunity."

Angel opened a maintenance closet and thumped Carin's head against the door frame as she entered. Her wife yelped through her sobbing, but that didn't matter: the room was near the center of the floor, away from the outer walls and windows.

She not-quite dumped her wife between a mop bucket, a push broom and a Tetris-pile of paper towel rolls.

"Keep down!" Angel ordered. "I'll be back."

In the darkness, Carin's wide eyes goggled through where Angel stood. The night vision left her in shades of gray and black, giving her the grainy tragedy of a last known photograph.

"Angie, please don't leave me . . ."

Angel slapped her--not hard--and fought to keep the crack out of her voice. The helmet's modulation helped.

"No, listen to me. You lie here. Do not stand, do not sit. The lower you are, the less likely you'll get shot. Do you understand?"

Carin nodded and reached up blindly until she touched the invisible mask. "I love you," she said. Too much like, goodbye.

Angel nodded against the slender fingers, held them in her hand. Burning eyes blurred sight, but somehow the suit siphoned away the tears.

"Love you too, babe," she managed through the lump. "It's . . . it's a bumpy ride, I know, but after this my elf juju can fix you up, and it'll be smooth cruising. See you in a few."

Angel closed the door. As she stalked away, she fought the impulse to go back and leave Carin the guard's pistol, but aside from some backwoods plinking with a .22 rifle, her wife had never touched a firearm. And what good would it do?

No, if anyone was going to save her, it was going to be Angel. Which was bad, because Angel didn't know what to do.

The gunfire ceased, but helicopter chops still whispered ghostlike through the building. A herd of footsteps ran from somewhere above. Readying her pulse carbine, Angel leaned against a wall and spared precious seconds mulling her options.

Her first, wild-monkey 'fight-or-flight' instinct had been to snatch Carin, smash out a window and fly off like Superman. But the helicopters would see them, and the miniguns of those AH-6 Little Birds could chainsaw the sky. The next idea had been to race down eight flights to the ground floor and try to sneak out. But if they'd landed a SWAT team on the roof, no doubt they also entered through the front doors. One goes down, one goes up. Search and destroy.

And now that the Feds were showing themselves to be bullet-spraying crazies . . .

"You need to act," the elf said.

Angel ran down the hall until she reached the stairwell and half expected gunfire as she palmed open the door, but only darkness greeted her. With almost no ambient light, her vision rendered the stairs as black sooty angles which contrasted weirdly with her purple HUD-drawn legs racing down the steps. She looked unreal to herself, like a computer generated spirit.

She exited on the seventh story. From an open room, a hunched over doctor peered down the hall at the swinging door, but of course saw no one. Angel situated herself by the edge of a window, yanked the curtain down and shouldered her carbine. Her fishbowl peripheral allowed her to watch both ways down the hallway: the long stretch to the left, the stairway to the right. Outside, across the street, ran a long wall of buildings that made an urban canyon of 34th. The rotors grew louder. She waited.

The strategy seemed sound enough: the SWAT were somewhere out there, and she would deal with them when they appeared. In the meantime, the helicopters were the greater threat. So she was going to shoot them down. Helicopters full of cops.

For Carin, anything.

Serving in the Military Police Corps, she cleared more houses than she could count during her four tours of duty, and by the end she even led the teams. Each raid had always been preceded by a fear-buzz. She might catch a bullet in the face. There might be a IED under a couch. Hell, maybe it was all an ambush, and she'll end up snuff-fodder in some Liveleak video. If nothing else, the uncertainty made her alive, and at least she knew her buddies had her back.

Now it was just her. And an elf in her ear.

"You can help my aim, right?" Angel asked.

"Within limits."

"Do so."

Violet cross-hairs appeared on her HUD. It moved with her carbine.

"You should deploy your drones," the elf said.

Angel frowned. She forgot she had them.

Shots rang from the stairs. Running steps. Angel turned in time for the door to fly open and a tall, thin man in battered full plate armor to barge into the hallway. Angel opened fire.

It wasn't like Star Wars. The carbine had the recoil of a flashlight. It hummed. No dramatic red bolts jetted from the barrel. Instead, a bright, lime-white spot hissed and blossomed sparks as it zigzagged across the man's silver chest.

Screaming like a girl, the man raised his hands to his face and fell on his back. He flopped like a startled cat and sprinted practically on all fours back into the stairwell. She listened to his footsteps scamper down. From above she heard voices.

Outside the window, about twenty meters out, one of the Little Birds swung into view, and Angel realized she had stepped out from the wall. The helicopter swiveled as it spotted her.

Angel shot first. The window spat and fissured against the heat, and through the spiderweb of cracks she saw the cockpit bubble do the same as the panicked craft wobbled in place.

Miniguns shredded the wall to her right. Angel sprinted left.

"You should deploy your drones," the elf said again.

"I know!" Angel shouted, ducking beside a window. Light and smoke exploded outside the stairway door, and the SWAT team charged through the flashbang's wake already shooting. Hammers smacked Angel's bicep, knee and breastplate. She toppled backwards before huddling behind a nearby janitor cart.

Molded plastic and cleaning supplies proved poor protection against automatic assault rifle fire. Angel cried, screamed, clutching her pulse carbine as bullets beat her back. Don't go bananas, she told the monkey in her brain. You've been in this fix before. Only one way out.

The impacts threw off her aim, but with a laser that scarcely matters. Crouched and leaning out, she lit up one of the cops until his black body armor burst into smoke and his neck steamed red. Another dropped her weapon and clawed at her melted gas-mask and goggles. The remaining two fired off a few wild rounds before retreating through the doorway, their surviving teammate stumbling after them.

Watching them disappear, Angel tried to steady her shaking hands, her pounding chest. She was pretty sure she'd wet herself. But aside from a few bruises, she seemed intact. She looked to the body smoldering on the tiled floor.

"I don't want to fight you!" Angel shouted. "Stay back!"

Then, quieter: "Let's see these drones."

They slid out from a vent in her side. Three silver frisbees unfolded magically into floating, motorcycle-length craft shaped like shark spaceships. A smaller disc, about the size of an Eisenhower dollar, rose into the air and extended into a crystal dildo before vanishing from sight.

Her HUD sprouted four video feeds along the edge. Two of the attack drones she used to cover the stairway door, while the third watched the hallway to her rear. The cloaked one she carefully guided by thought down the hall and out the burned hole in the window.

Though her eyes outside could not yet see, by the sound of the rotors, Angel could tell the approaching helicopter was one of the Little Birds. She frowned at her carbine.

"Nice gun," she said, "but a little too 'small arms.' How's the plasma bow compare?"

"Slower rate of fire; much greater damage."

"What's its penetration?"

"Approximately twenty centimeters of rolled homogeneous armor."

"All right, then."

Hanging the laser by its shoulder strap, she held out her hand and a spindly complex compound bow butterfly-knifed out of her arm. Fashioned as a stylized 'M,' the weapon eerily resembled her own Bear Siren, except with a few extra centuries of refinement.

Angel tugged one of the five arrows from the attached quiver, and as she notched it to the hair-thin, almost ethereal string, the arrowhead ignited into a incandescent point so bright she was sure it would sear her retinas were it not for the protective visor. She turned in her crouch and aimed at the bullet-pocked wall and drew back. The pull felt perfect.

The spy drone spotted the Little Bird--not the one she'd damaged--flying sideways, its miniguns spooling up for a strafe. The drone also projected an adjusted perspective window on Angel's HUD, allowing her in effect x-ray vision.

The bow's purple aiming reticle rotated in anticipation as the blazing arrowhead scorched wallpaper and melted like wax the janitor's cart by her side, setting fire to its towels and toilet paper. Angel could feel the sting through her black gloves, even though her suit was spec'd for outer space.

The helicopter crossed her line of fire, and hesitated, probably sensing the heat behind her cover. Angel released. Fiery ash sneezed in her face as the starlike arrow passed through drywall and brick as if they were paper mache, and though she fell backwards off her heels, she saw through the spy drone's high-vantage the blinding streak stab the Little Bird full in the face. Debris from the explosion smacked like bullets through the burning, foot-wide hole.

Angel climbed to her feet, suddenly giddy with crazy pride. How many hunters could say they bow-bagged an attack chopper? Maybe after this was all over she could gather up the rotors, mount them above her fireplace beside her whitetail buck.

Smoke blanketing down the hallway, twenty or so meters to her left, slapped her back to her senses. Another four-man SWAT team swarmed out from the fog, guns blazing. Angel ducked down, taking grazes across her deltoid and ribs, and with a thought fired one of her drone's grenade launchers. A burst, and they tumbled like bowling pins. She held her fire as they limped their retreat, dragging their dead or wounded with them.

This had gone on long enough.

Angel crossed the hall to a open room. The doctor she'd seen earlier was there with a nurse, and both were huddled behind what looked like a MRI scanner. It sounded like they were praying. Of course, they didn't see her. Even her footsteps were somehow dampened.

She folded the bow back into her arm, readied her carbine and squatted by the door. Thinking off her external speaker, she said, "I need to speak to Agent what's his name."

"I'm now broadcasting on their frequency," the elf replied. "You may speak now."

Angel paused. She actually didn't know what to say. "Stop this," she demanded finally. "You're shooting into a fucking hospital."

"Because you're making us," the rough, male voice replied over the rotors' roar. He sounded different when not on a megaphone, older, more of a lifelong smoker. "Give yourself up. I promise you'll be taken care of. We know this is not your fault. You're under alien influence."

"But why me?" Angel said, sounding more like a whine than she intended. "Shouldn't you be fighting one of the mecha-Godzillas fucking up the city?"

The agent chuckled. "Because fighting you is easier. In case you haven't noticed, we're at war now. Our scientists need a suit, and we'll do anything to get one. Do you think we're going to turn tail and run just because you ray-gunned one of our birds? You're surrounded, and I assure you reinforcements are on the way. You and your accomplice would be better off surrendering now."

Angel practically hissed with anger. "Accomplice? Look, asshole, my wife has nothing to do with--"

"I think he's talking about me," said another male voice. Younger. That of a ragged stoner. "And no way are we accomplices. The bitch shot me! Lasered a fucking Zorro on my chest!"

"Yeah, my bad," Angel said. "Whoever you are."

"No biggie. I have Wolverine healing powers. Just itches a little now. Hey, I Wiki'd you earlier. You're that Angel Zacarias, right?"

Angel sighed at the mispronunciation. "That's what my birth certificate says."

"Man, I saw you shoot down that chopper. That was awesome."

"Um, thanks," Angel said. Despite everything, she laughed. "It was with a bow and arrow. Can you believe that?"

"You chose the plasma bow? No shit. This is just like Rambo, except it's in a hospital. And there's mechas. And you're a lesbian."

"I hate reboots," the agent said. "But to get back on topic here: we're not leaving without you two. Just give up. There's no way out."

Angel chewed her lip, suddenly wishing she could smoke through her mask. She tried a different approach. "That's where you're wrong. I didn't want to play this card, but you've left me no choice. My suit comes with a small antimatter device. You let me and my wife go, or Manhattan goes Hiroshima."

"Wait, you have one of those?" asked the stoner. "I don't remember that option."

Shut up! Angel thought.

"I see," the agent said. "Well, could you at least allow us to study your suit? Under your terms, of course."

"Don't trust them, lady," said the stoner. "They shot at me as soon as they saw me!"

From the her spy-drone, Angel watched all five helicopters (four Black Hawks and the wounded Little Bird) converge on her side of the hospital. Outside, their rotors overlapped with whirlwind slices.

"I'm serious," Angel said. "Let us go."

The Little Bird fired a rocket.

"No! Wa--" Angel cried.

The fiery shock wave flipped her like a rag-doll, and she skidded across the ceiling before landing behind the MRI scanner. A minigun hailstorm poured into the room, chipping the floor, obliterating the walls. Together Angel, the doctor and the nurse cowered behind the medical machine's great cylinder as never-ending bullet-swarms gouged away the metal innards.

"STOP!" Angel shouted. "STOP IT!"

She had only enough time to notice the doctor and nurse were staring at her with wild, bewildered eyes before another rocket struck the floor nearby and blasted her backwards. Flash. Fire. Concrete fell, dumping a hospital bed from above.

"Get up, Angel," the elf said. "Get up and fight."

Sobbing, brain swimming, Angel splayed drunkenly in a pile of studs and drywall. Flames and smoke coffined her in nightmare. She heard another rocket, and debris dumped on her as if shoveled by unseen demons. One horrible thought rattled her skull.

Carin. Carin, oh God.

"I surrender!" she cried hoarsly. On knees that felt like shattered glass, she propped herself up and screamed, "I SURRENDER! PLEASE, JUST MAKE IT STOP!"

But if the FBI heard, they gave no sign. Gunfire continued its crackle; a fourth rocket blew out another wall and knocked her off her feet. Parts of the ceiling fell like domino slabs. Water gushed along her back from broken pipes. She clawed the shattered floor like a baby, blubbering over the radio for mercy.

"Get up," the elf said. "Get up. You must save your wife."

Angel didn't get up but crawled forward through the haphazard labyrinth of collapsed concrete. She'd lost her laser, so she again folded out her bow. A rocket screamed overhead, but exploded somewhere distant.

Through rubble and rebar and over a flaming spring mattress, Angel crawled to the MRI scanner, which was now half-skeletal, though still more or less intact. She crouched behind the exposed donut of one of the magnets, beside something that looked too much like a severed leg. Bullets dinged against the metal, but only as afterthoughts. They didn't know where she was; they were just going to shoot and blow the hospital to hell and root through the remains for her precious suit.

Or at least pin her down until reinforcements arrived.

Her wounds had already regenerated, but her hands trembled. She took out and notched one of the arrows and prayed to a God she didn't believe in as the tip shone like a pebbled sun. She had to get through this. She had to see it to the end.

All of her attack drones were blown up, but the spy-drone was all that really mattered. Through it's bird's eye view she zeroed on the Little Bird and watched as it let fly yet another rocket. Somewhere: an avalanche.

Leaning out, she followed the HUD reticle and released. Broken concrete splashed away molten as the plasma shaft blazed a silica-searing tunnel to the Little Bird. Angel didn't wait for the fireball but notched another: it was the Black Hawks' turn.

She shot down three of them. The fourth got away. Ran out of arrows.

Refolding the bow, she climbed a miniature Mt. Everest of rocks to reach the jagged, crumbling face of 34th Street Canyon. The sun had set, and the sky was black. Below burned the fiery abyss where bad helicopters go.

Ice clutched her heart, but she had to see. She might still be . . .

It was too much trouble to excavate back to whatever was left of the stairway, so she used the suit's prowess to leap up and grab the exposed rebar along the wall-less edge of the floor above. She hauled herself up, scraping the already scarred breastplate of her now de-cloaked hide, and stepped with dread into the dark, rocket-blasted cavern where she'd left her wife.

All was shredded walls and blackened studs. Holes in the floor dropped to the story below. Sprinklers drizzled. Her throat tightened; she could not call Carin's name. She'd seen what IEDs could do. She knew.

She found the body under scorched paper towels and drywall. The bald, delicate head was seared bright red. Overpressure had ruptured the eyes. Still wet blood trailed from the ears and nose and a mouth that would never finish its scream.

The sob began as a vague moan, a titter, but then Angel was on her knees and burrowing through the smouldering trash to clutch her wife to her chest as wailing sobs rang inside her helmet. She cried, she begged. She said she was sorry.

"Angel!" shouted a woman's voice. The elf. There was an elf in her ear. She knew that. And the elf was shouting. It'd been doing so for a while.

"The brain is intact," the elf said. "You must hurry. Find someplace below freezing! Someplace cold! There's still a chance."

Angel stood up dumbly. "Someplace cold," she said. Something in her mind sputtered and stirred, like an idling engine revved somewhat to life. "A chance."

"There will be damage. You must hurry."

With her wife's frail corpse cradled in her arms, she spread her wings and blasted off from the ruins of the NYU Cancer Center. The last Black Hawk, circling menacingly, strafed at her as she ascended above the wounded city. Behind her, a blinding white beam connected a hospital window with the helicopter, and it dropped out of the night sky like a smashed toy on fire.

"Take that, G-man!" said the stoner. "Hey, Angel, er, Ms. Zacarias, is that you up in the sky? Hello? Are you there?"

A chance is just a chance. That's all they had before, so nothing had changed. Either the chemo would work or it would not. Either the elf magic would work or it would not.

But win or lose, Angel knew what she would do: find someplace cold and hold onto her wife and never let go.

To be continued . . .

JMHthe3rd · Nov 8, 2014

Back to Index

Power Armor CYOA

Name: Dr. Linda Brickle
Gender: Female
Age: 35

Appearance: Has light ginger hair, forest-green eyes and a pretty, if oily, face that rarely smiles. Confined to a wheelchair. Wears baggy, unflattering sweaters. No longer bothers with makeup.

Personality: Computer geek. Intelligent and bitter. Distances herself from others. Throws herself into her work for the Bureau, in which she takes great pride. Though she claims she's moved on, she not-so-secretly resents her husband for leaving her after the shooting. Hobbies include anime, video games and writing fan fiction. Loves her three cats.

Character History: Graduated valedictorian of her high school. Received her BS in Computer Networking and Security at age twenty. After a brief employment with the Weyland Corporation, she applied in the FBI's IT Entry Program, hiring on as a Special Agent in 2002. She excelled in her duties, her cases mostly involving cyber-crimes and tracking internet activity. Married fellow agent Ollie Boyle in 2004. Earned a Master of Science in Information Technology from NJIT in 2007.

The 2008 Westland Park shooting changed everything. They say if the bullet had passed a centimeter to the left, she would have bled out in less than a minute. That was her leg, though. The gunshot to her abdomen wasn't so fortuitously placed.

Ollie was sorry, but he couldn't deal with it. Linda was served the divorced papers even before the physical therapy began.

Since paraplegics don't meet a Special Agent's physical requirements, Linda was transferred to the FBI's professional staff where she found a new career in intelligence analysis. Continuing her education, she earned a PhD in Computer Science. She worked hard. She did her job and she did it well.

Then one September evening in 2014 thousands of egg-shaped objects sprinkle all over the Earth.

Even before she hears of the mecha rampages, she knows she's in for a long day. What she doesn't know is that one of the green pods waits for her in the backyard of her suburban home.

Her three cats sit by the window and watch it warily.

Name: Liberty Queen
Class: Fortress
Body: Avian/Hunter [60]
Colors: White with Black line detailing. Looks a little like a Mass Production Evangelion, except with a more feminine body and the face of the Statue of Liberty.
Features: Flight [Free, Avian]

Suit AI: Agent [10]
User Interface: Nerve Suit [5]

HUD

Advanced Suit Status [5]
Hawkeye [Free, Avian]
Night Vision [Free, Avian]
Thermal Vision [Free, Hunter]
Radar [Free, Hunter]

Comms

Terminal [10]
Spider [5]
Defense Maze [5]
Spyware [5]

Weapons

Crowd Control [5]
Machine Gun x2 [20]
Rail Rifle [20]
Plasma Rifle [20]

Drones

Light (x2, Fortress, Autocannon, Particle Beam, Ion Cannon) [5]
Scout (x2, Fortress) [5]

Drone Upgrades

Light: Airstorm [5]
Scout: Spotter [5]

Upgrades

Environmental Controls III [Free, Hunter]
Capacitor [20]
Collapsible II [10]

Nanites

Canvas [5] (To look human)
Hydra I [10]
Mycelium I [10]
Progenitor [10]

Final Stats:

Dexterity: Avian Form: 1 / Hunter Form: 4
Durability: Avian Form: 3 / Hunter Form: 5
Power (+6 Capacitor): Avian Form: 11 / Hunter Form: 5
Recovery: 1
Speed: Avian Form: 5 / Hunter Form: 3
Strength: 5

JMHthe3rd · Nov 11, 2014

Back to Index

Overlord CYOA

Marvis J. Hunsley
13th Earl of Eastrodor
Age: 21

Housing
Eastrodor (City in the Sky) [+2 Airships Free]

One of the three remaining Cloud Cities of the Norfyr Age, Eastroder hovers above the ore-rich veins of the Scryscrim Mountains. The alchemical lanterns that keep it afloat are dimming slowly, and the arts to rekindle them have been lost for a millennium. Soon, it is feared, the great city will fall.

Near the Serjan border, its inhabitants' allegiance to the Mernish Church is not as strong as one would hope. It harbors a secret-but-significant community of pagan moon-worshipers.

Domain
Scryscrim Mountains

Adviser
Chandrakanta Hunsley (Dragon Companion, see below)

Perks

Study [-1 Shard]
The Mind [-1 Shard]
Alchemy x2 [-2 Shards]
Gold [-1 Shard, +4 Gold]

Immortality
None

Followers
Airships x10 [2 Free, -8 Coins]
Cook [-1 Coin]
Captain of the Guard [-1 Coin]
Squad of Guards x4 Archers (120), x4 Footmen (200) [-8 Coins]
Diplomat [-1 Coin]
Spymaster [-1 Coin]
Master Worker [-1 Coin]
Master Blacksmith [-1 Coin]
~~Pet~~ Dragon (Chandrakanta Hunsley, see below) [-10 Coins]
Takwin (Cempa Hunsley, Warforged, see below) [-1 Coin]

Complications
Monster Army [+2 Coins]
Crusade (Led by Grand Master Ridefort, see below) [+3 Coins]
Coup (Call themselves, "Holy Daughter's Vengeance") [+2 Coin]
King Winfrid [+6 Coins]
Disguised Assassins [+2 Coins]
Enemy Wizard [+2 Coins]
Merchant Inheritor [+2 Coins]

Coins: 10 (Starting), +4 (Gold Perk), +18 (Complications) - 32 (Followers) = 0

Dragon Companion
Chandrakanta Hunsley

Chandrakanta Hunsley
Age: 20

Chandra is Marvis' half-sister, born of a union between Sir Jago Hunsley and the Drakess Vipraksa. After her parents' murder at hands of Marvis' great-uncle, Grand Master Ridefort, she was spirited away by her adopted brother, the Warforged Cempa, and smuggled north to the pagan, more racially tolerant country of Serja.

There she stayed for seven years, studying at Zapaport University and discovering a talent for finance, alchemy and (thanks to her Shenlong heritage) water elementalism. There was the occasional assassin sent by Ridefort, but between her magic and Cempa's combat prowess, they were little more than a nuisance. Despite the tragedy that brought her there, she enjoyed her time in Serja and grew to love its people.

Then the Red Death swept through the continent and her half-brother, captive for so long as Ridefort's "apprentice," found himself the new Earl of Eastodor. Released from his great-uncle by order of King Winfrid, Marvis rode to the floating city and wasted no time calling his beloved sister and brother to his side. There she became his primary adviser, though she found her brother's transformation disturbing: the years of abuse had left him a bit . . . mad. His eye twitches. He screams in his sleep. Scars crisscross his back. And there was the St. Gladwyns' Cathedral Massacre.

But she loves him still; its not his fault. And so she advocates peace and restraint to counter his vengeful obsessions. And, hopefully, curtail any future atrocities.

She's aware of her brother's . . . confused feelings for her, and is trying to play matchmaker between him and his cook, Polly Birdwood. After all, he did cure Polly's son's pneumonia (with bread mold of all things), and the quickest way to a man's heart is through his stomach.

Currently, Chandra's in an affair with the Serjan Ambassador. Marvis doesn't know.

Size
Dragonborn

Type
Shenlong

Perks

Elementalism (Water)
Magic (Alchemy)
Benevolence
Hatchling (Free)
Intelligent and Cunning

Takwin (Artificial Life)
Cempa Hunsley

Cempa Hunsley

Age: 1,000+

Marvis' father unearthed the Warforged solider during an excavation of the Aegborg Ruins near his manor house. Finding his body largely intact, Jago spent three years refining pitchblende (or "Uraninite," to use the old Mernen name) to replace the alchemical batteries. He slipped the glowing yellow rods into the chest, and the ancient construct awoke.

Having lost most memory of his previous life, he had to be raised as if a child. Jago and Vipraksa named him, 'Cempa' after a Meerish hero of old. They adopted him into their family.

After Jago and Vipraksa's murder and Marvis' capture, Cempa fled to Serja with young Chandra where he wore a skin mask to disguise himself as a disfigured man. He enjoyed ripping the heads off assassins. It was fun.

After Marvis inherited Eastrodor, he returned with his sister to serve his brother.

Assembled of wood, stone and adamantine steel, Cempa makes for a fierce bodyguard. He's a simple soul, uncreative and literal-minded. He's entirely unconcerned with Marvis' madness.

Grand Master of the Meerland Crusade
Grand Master Ridefort

Grand Master Elwin Ridefort
Age: 67

Supreme Commander of the Meerland Chapter of The Paladin Order of God's Daughter and of the Holy Church of Mern, Ridefort rose to his rank at a relatively young age through acts of piety and bravery and a ruthless dedication to duty. Tasked by the Pater Sancta to rid Meerland of unclean races, he led expeditions into neighboring orcish lands, expelled the elves from Helistad and personally slew the Red Dragon of the Goldswear Forest.

When he learned of his niece's suicide, he was inconsolable and blamed her husband, for he never liked Sir Jago Hunsley. No doubt his wretched interest in 'science' was to blame, though Ridefort could prove nothing.

Years later he heard terrible rumors that Jago was in an unnatural relationship with a Shenlong dragon--the creature had even born him a half-breed abomination. The beastality had gone on for years, Ridefort was told, and in his heart his suspicions were confirmed: Jago murdered his wife for his dragon mistress.

Even though the Aegborg Ruins were outside his jurisdiction, Ridefort led a company of knights into the mountainous land and hunted the dragon to its lair (Hunsley Manor). He personally plunged his zwiehander into the beast's scaly chest and made his young grand-nephew watch as he burned his father for his sins.

However, the "dragonborn" daughter had escaped with a demon-possessed automaton. Ridefort couldn't pursue them into Serja without sparking a war, but he sent many assassins. None ever returned.

He took Marvis as an apprentice and brought him back to St. Milburga's Cathedral in Frummberg. At first the boy was a impertinent blasphemer, claiming the dragon had been his mother and calling Ridefort a murderer. Ridefort flogged his grand-nephew mightily and read him the scriptures to ease his soul. In time, Marvis' madness subsided, and he proved a brilliant, if docile student, absorbing everything he heard or read. Ridefort thought he would make an excellent cleric.

Then the Red Death decimated the continent, and Ridefort got word that Marvis was the new Earl of Eastrodor. Ridefort held misgivings about this, since Eastrodor was a city known for its scientific roots--and it was perilously close to pagan lands--but legally he had no grounds to keep his grand-nephew from his inheritance. And besides, that piously blank look in Marvis' eyes told him all he needed to know: he was a Godly man.

So, with a heavy heart, he wished Marvis well and told him how proud he was. May the Holy Daughter Bless his rule!

Not a month later Marvis blew up Eastrodor's Cathedral, killing all inside. The bishop, he fired from a long steel tube.

The Pater Sancta has loaned the Meerland Chapter 1,000 knights (along with a Clerical-Wizard) to aid against "Marvis the Mad." Ridefort for his part can't understand what came over the boy. Obviously it was his dragon-monster of a sister. She must have corrupted his soul.

Marvis' Backstory

Marvis doesn't remember his real mother. He was only two when she was found in that blood-filled tub, and if she was so eager to abandon him, then she was a small loss. The only mother who mattered was the Drakess Vipraksa.

She was kind as goddesses should be. She was wise beyond human years. In her human form, she'd sit him and Chandra in her lap at night and read them stories of the old Mernen Empire and their scientific marvels. In her Drake form, they would cling to her scaly back as she flew into the endless blue sky over the Aegborg Mountains. That he scarcely saw anyone else hardly bothered him. He had his father's laboratory and library; he had Vipraksa's many lifetimes of adventurous tales.

When he was seven, his father unearthed an old Warforge from ruins near their manor house. For three years, his father labored on the machine man until--as if by magic--the Warforge's emerald eyes flashed to life. It's alive! Alive! His father had created life! Or least re-awoken created life; but in young Marvis' mind it made little difference, for in this act did he not only gain a brother, but also an enduring love for alchemical science.

He ensnared every fact. His intellect knew no satiation. Life was good.

The first time he met his great-uncle was when he and a hundred knights stormed his father's manor house. Vipraksa switched to her Drake form and tore the great hall asunder with elemental magic, but there were far too many. They crippled her with fiery arrows, and Ridefort butchered her on the floor as she thrashed.

Ridefort burned his father on a pile of his alchemy books, proclaiming that his agony will cleanse his soul. Forced to watch, Marvis screamed and cried. He was fourteen.

The next seven years trickled by as a nightmare gone numb. There were beatings, whippings, scripture readings. Marvis went away inside. The Daughter loves him. Dragons are wicked. His father was a very bad man.

He learned not to look at Vipraksa's stuffed corpse, hanging from the domed cathedral ceiling with all the others. If they found his sister, would they hang her there too? He tried not to think of it. Dragons are wicked. The Daughter loves him.

When the Red Death came, he scarcely noticed, so focused was he on his scriptural studies. Then his great-uncle told him the news: he was an Earl now. He was free. For the first time in years, his soul stirred. He dared to hope.

Eastrodor was a long lost dream come to life. He'd heard of the cloud cities, and now he owned one. Such mechanical marvels! And the library! Thirty thousand books! And deep in the castle basement he found the laboratory with its ancient volumes of alchemy and engineering.

It seems the old earl shared Marvis' interest in science; he'd been experimenting to re-create the wonders of old. Written in High Mernen, the journals and texts contained formulas for medicines and explosives, schematics for Warforge and uraninite-powered engines. They even offered designs for the city's alchemical levitation lanterns--lanterns which if scaled up and suitably modified could not only defy gravity, but fling objects across the world, even pull rocks down from the heavens.

Apparently, there was a war, and they were used. And that's why there's no longer a Mernen Empire. That's why there's tales passed down of the 'Hundred Years Winter.'

"Some weapons," the previous earl had written, "ensure there are no victors."

Bah! Technophobic nonsense! Marvis would use them all. He told his Master Blacksmith what he needed, and together they went to work.

While Chandra and Cempa were returning from their exile, Marvis tested his new black powder on St. Gladwyn's Cathedral. A smashing success. Literally.

If no one else, the city's large contingent of closet pagans enjoyed the spectacle, but Bishop What's-His-Face threw a hissy fit, screaming about damnation and hellfire. Marvis ejected him from the city. By cannon.

His reunion with his siblings was a happy one. Cempa is as stalwart a brother as anyone can ask. And his sister is so radiantly beautiful, his heart flutters by her very presence! She's so much like Vipraksa . . .

On the other hand, Chandra seems a bit disturbed by some of his actions. But she just doesn't understand. Religion is a disease. A plague of the mind. It must be eradicated without mercy.

And why does she keep pushing that Polly girl on him? He cured her child, true enough, and she's a sweet enough girl, in her humble capacity, but . . . ?

As expected, King Winfird and the Church have raised hosts against him. And there is those religious rebels to contend with. And an orcish army has migrated in from the north.

But Marvis is unconcerned. He's negotiating a military alliance with Serja, the uraninite mines are in full production and even in its embryonic state, his fleet of aerial dreadnoughts can bomb whole cities to rubble.

His factories are already making the first firearms; once he unlocks the secret of Warforge manufacturing, he can wipe his foes from the field. And once his Gravitonic Lighthouse is fully operational, he can drop the very stars from the sky. Who then will dare stand in his path?

His immediate plans are to destroy the paladins at Frummberg and retrieve Vipraksa's corpse. After that, he'll fly his fleet to Mern and obliterate the very heart of the Church. In time, he will dismantle all kingdoms in all lands. He will remake the world as it should be: no disease or hunger or poverty or war. No religion or racism or ignorance or hate.

Let the Long Night end! Let the New Sun rise! Today dawns the Age of Science!

JMHthe3rd · Nov 11, 2014

Back to Index

Overlord CYOA

The Rise and Fall of Marvis J. Hunsley
13th Earl of Eastrodor and Emperor of the Scientific Imperium

Character Sheet

Prologue
---

Summer, Anno Filiae: 1021, 28th Year of King Winfrid's Reign.
Eastern Meerland, Aegborg Mountains, Hunsley Family Estate.

---

Water squirted Marvis, and he kicked back frantically from the edge, protecting the book against his shirt. His sister's laughter rang off the ruined walls. He peeked at the pages: too late. Droplets scarred the paper, the stylistically cursive 'x' and 't' of 'mixturam' already smearing.

Carefully, he dabbed the paper with his sleeve. His face burned with anger. Swimming in place beside algae and flowered lily pads, Chandra raised her horned head, puffed her pale, faintly green cheeks and spat another long stream at him.

"Stop it!" he cried, dodging. "This is Procelsus! It's three hundred years old!"

"Who cares? You've read him like twenty times."

"I'll tell father!"

"Go ahead. And you'll get to explain why you took one of his books from the library. To the swimming pool, no less!"

With that, his sister sank to the murky depths. But after a moment small, needle-nailed hands gripped an ancient brass pipe running along the tiled ledge, and she pulled herself out. Her grin flashed fanged teeth.

"I'll tell him you splashed me on purpose." Marvis said. "Then we'll both get in trouble!"

She sat down and idly kicked bare feet in the pool. Water dribbled from her red pixie hair. "So, we'll both get in trouble. You worry too much."

"And you don't appreciate literature. You never read anything unless you had to."

Her shrug flexed her spine's bony knobs against her swimsuit. The wet scales freckling her shoulders glistened in the sunlight. "I do well in my studies."

"So what? That's not how you get smart." He stood proudly, though she was turned away. "I bet I've read ten times the books you have."

"Of course you have," she said. "You don't have much time."

"What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded, though he already knew. She was fighting dirty.

"It means I can read books later. It means when you're a toothless, shriveled old coot, I'll look like I'm in my twenties."

It was true, and it hurt every time she mentioned the cruel fact. Why couldn't Vipraksa be his real mother? Why couldn't he be half-dragon too?

"Oh yeah?" he said, regretting the words even before he spoke. "You might live hundreds of years, but you're still a freak. You saw what happened when mother's glamor spell broke. The townsfolk screamed and made the sign of the Daughter. They thought you were a demon!"

Chandra turned to look at him. Her brittle frown told him he'd struck a blow. "That's just here," she said. "Not every country's so stupid."

"Where would you go?" he asked. "The Elves have Oin-Gazar and the Dwarves the Clachgraines, but what homeland for a Dragonborn girl, hmm? Face it, you're going to live a long, lonely life. You'll probably have to live in a cave."

Tears shone in her angry amber eyes. "You're just jealous."

"I am not!" Marvis said. "Who'd want to have horns and scales? They're weird and gross!"

After she screamed that she hated him and ran away crying, Marvis wiped droplets from his spectacles, sat at the tiled edge and tried to read. But victory came with a price, and he felt too terrible. Trying to copy his father's wise scowl (but without the whiskers), he brooded until the sun passed below the jagged rubble that once was a bathhouse wall.

He heard his brother before he saw him. Muffled footsteps sent ripples dancing as Cempa lumbered out of the aqueduct tunnel and along the bottom of the swimming pool. His adamantine and brass head appeared first, followed by his thick oaken neck and bulky, armor-plated body as he ascended the gentle incline to the surface.

Dripping wet and smelling of mildewed wood, Cempa creaked over to Marvis and stared down at him with green-lit alexandrite eyes. The expressionless face and taciturn ways made it hard to tell with his Warforged brother, but Marvis was almost certain the benefits of water upon his arboreal flesh was only an excuse: he just liked being submerged.

"Where's . . . Chandra?" asked Cempa, his baritone rasping ghostlike.

Marvis hugged his knees, pressing Procelsus' Chymiae's leather-bound cover against his chest. "I called her a freak."

Cempa paused thoughtfully. "That's not . . . very nice."

"No," said Marivs. "No, it's not."

They entered the quadracycle, and Cempa hadn't pedaled far before they spotted her in the nubbed semicircle that marked the old castle turret. Vipraksa sat beside her in humanoid form, a long, thin, golden-scaled arm hugging her daughter's towel-draped shoulders.

That gave Marvis pause. Not that he feared his mother's wrath, but rather he dreaded her disappointment. She'd understand but be hurt nonetheless.

Though she of course heard the cycle's iron wheels grinding the gravel rocks, Vipraksa only raised her red eyes when Cempa stopped.

Marvis climbed out of his seat and stammered. The shame choked at his shirt collar. "I shouldn't have said . . ." he began, and then tried again, "I didn't mean . . ."

"I believe Chandra owes you an apology," his mother said pleasantly.

When Marvis thought of nothing to say, Chandra looked up glumly from her knees, her still damp bangs curtaining her eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have made fun of your . . . short life. I wish you could live as long as I can."

Vipraksa gave her melodious laugh and snuggled Chandra into the silk folds of her sari. "By Agharta! Children shouldn't worry about death. Besides, I'll outlive you both--but what difference does it make in the end? Nothing last forever."

"What about souls?" Marvis asked. The question surprised him, but he'd always been curious. And though Vipraksa seemed reluctant to speak of those days, she'd once mentioned that she'd practiced necromancy when she was 'young and foolish.' Back when there were necromancers.

Vipraksa held up an inhumanly long finger; a snowflake formed on its clawed tip. In her other hand a small globe of water appeared, hovering slightly above her palm. The snowflake fluttered down until reaching the sphere where it sank inside and melted away.

"Nothing last forever," she repeated. "Even ghosts die. Even afterlifes are built on dreams and shadow. It may take a million million years, but time is the devourer of all things."

And then she smiled. "Make the most of what you have."

Cempa stayed with the quadracycle for he was far too heavy, but Marvis and Chandra rode on Vipraksa's back as she flew them to the manor house. Marvis felt always that rush of fear and exultation at these flights. There was no danger, of course. Though her Drakess form wore no saddles, her weather elementalism kept the wind at bay, and even if they were to jump, she was more than capable of snatching them before they struck the rocky earth.

The breeze ruffled Marvis' blond hair, flapped his wool coat. The gnashing black and gray of the Aegborg Mountains passed below like stone waves, and he grinned at the setting sun, hugging with his arms and legs Vipraksa's warm, golden scales. She was his dragon stepmother, and in her heart she carried a millennium of magic, wisdom and love.

Arriving at Hunsley Hall, they circled before landing by the cobbled, half-renovated ruins of the eastern wing. They found their father, as usual, in his laboratory. Sipping a cup of hibiscus tea, he hunched over an great, thick volume of lore that occupied the lion's share of his desk.

He glanced up, then down and then pulled off his tiny spectacles and squinted at Chandra. "You've been crying," he observed.

"Oh, they had a bit of a tiff," Vipraksa said dismissively, now back in her humanoid form.

His father's scowl was a drooped slit in his beard. "What about?"

"Comparing lifespans," Vipraksa said. "Rude, isn't it?"

His father laughed--something he did sparingly--and said, "Duration doesn't matter. It's how you use it that counts. Not that there's anything to worry about, Marvis. Several decades of life is nothing to turn your nose at, and I plan on sticking around for most of that. And of course you'll always have your mother."

They both died the next day.

JMHthe3rd · Dec 2, 2014

Back to Index

Cyberpunk CYOA

Dr. Hadley Mabella
---~2~---
Lau Basin, South Pacific Ocean
2088

"You're going to have to stay awake while I'm gone, Kay," Hadley says in a helium-shot rasp. "Do you think you can do that?"

His niece is slumped in the co-pilot seat. Her moan is a squeak.

Built for deep-sea habitat maintenance, the Minnow is stocked with construction supplies. Undeniably useful, but more power would have been nice. And food. And medicine.

But in these gloomy depths, Hadley makes do.

Already he's installed the pods with burst transmitters. Next comes the thermite. With amplified sight and trembling hands, he slides stylus-sized charges into the beacons which clutter the small submersible's currently tilted deck like so many aluminum cantaloupes.

The Minnow is all but shut down. Only passive sonar. No heat, no lights. A thousand meters of cold sea creaks against the hull, but their skinsuits stave off hypothermia. High-pressure nervous syndrome will kill them before they freeze.

Kay complained that they didn't need to do this: why torture themselves with chems and super-dense air when the sub can just as easily maintain a steady 1 atm? But they would never reach Fiji without recharging, and being wanted for who-knows-what, it's not like they can stop by any atoll station. To get what they need, he must go outside and crawl where the sun never shines. And the Minnow doesn't have an atmospheric diving suit.

So, for the last week they've taken the Barilex pills while gradually pressurizing the sub with heliox. But despite the saturation-accelerating drugs, human tissue is not meant to absorb gas so quickly. The tremors and myoclonic jerks aren't bad yet, but even with his many cognitive-augments, he grows disoriented.

A couple of days ago, he wandered the cabin awake but unresponsive, clawing at bulkheads and pressing buttons at random. Fortunately, Kay was in one of her lucid moments and managed to trip him.

It's effecting her worse, but Hadley keeps his amygdala blocked; he can't afford to worry.

But just one quick venture outside, and then they can begin the slow decompression and shed this mad atmosphere.

He primes the last pod and dumps it on the deck where its metallic roll reverberates in the cabin's thick air. From the nearby medical nook he retrieves a syringe (a hypospray won't work in 33 atms) filled with a prepared cocktail. Bracing for the sub's slant, he props himself up and limps to the cockpit with his peg-leg.

The exploding bullet had already done most of the work, so the amputation was no more than sawing through a meat rope. The hemo-seal and bandages took care of the stump, and with some spray-foam, nylon straps and an aluminum-alloy pipe, they crafted a serviceable, if unbending, prosthesis. If it weren't for his beta-endophine blockers, he'd be screaming with every step.

But Kay can't turn off her pain, and the morphine ran out four days ago. Paracetamol keeps down the fever; fluxacillin slows the infection, but what she needs is a surgical unit to remove the ceramic dust-shards polluting her thin bicep. It may be too late to the save the arm.

He leans by her side and brushes a wet, pallid cheek with a trembling hand. In the pale blue glow of controls, her young face is a despairing capture of his sister when she was a child.

"I've been saving this," he says in a high-pitched but hopefully gentle tone. He holds the needle before her. "It's part stimulant, part analgesic. It won't last long, but it'll keep you functional. And I need you, Kay. I need you."

Her cynical, helium laugh belongs to a dying mouse. Hadley taps the syringe, squeezes out a drop and jabs the hypodermic into her good arm. She screams, thrashes, gnashes her teeth. Brown pupils roll in wide white.

He waits until she calms down, her mental fog clearing.

"I'm headed to the station," he says. "There's a fair chance I'll be spotted. Keep radio silence. Watch the passive-sonar. If you see anything, move to pick me up. Drop beacons if they launch."

Shaking, she stares at him with a slack jaw and unfocused eyes, and at first he thinks she doesn't understand. But then she nods.

"I'll . . . I'll try my best."

He doesn't need his social analyzer to know his niece needs encouragement. He's not very good at this, but settles with, "I know you will. I'm proud of you. And I'm sorry."

Her lank, black hair is greasy against his kiss. He says nothing more, gives her no final glance.

He pulls on a hood, goggles and gloves, and, almost as an afterthought, straps Absolon's gyrojet pistol to his side with a nylon sheet. From a maintenance locker he retrieves a tarp of phase-change material. Designed to minimize thermal wear from underwater power plants, the PCM will mask Hadley's heat signature.

With the press of a dully lit screen, the deck's door sleepily irises opens to slosh frigid seawater into the cabin. Clasping it to his neck, Hadley wraps himself in the tarp as if it were a cloak and crawls through the portal into the Pacific depths. His filter implant tickles to life as he breathes ocean. From the curved ventral hull of the sub, he pops open a small hatch and tugs loose a retractable superconducting cable which will allow a speedy recharge of their lithium-air batteries.

So far down, the noon sun is but a twilight suggestion, but his light enhanced eyes can see well enough. The Minnow is perched near the craggy ridge of a long dormant volcano festooned with tumorous barnacles and anemones whose spines coat rocks like stubble. A sloping, two thousand meter abyss gapes to Hadley's left, beyond which lies a gnarled mountain range that he makes out only as blue-fogged teeth, godlike and rotted dark.

Out of nearby stones, a whale ribcage reaches like frozen claws. A spidercrab bigger than Hadley's head pinches at the tarp. Hadley moves on.

About forty years ago, there was an energy crisis. Too many adolescent nations, not enough power to feed the growth spurts. Many hadn't even been weened off fossil fuels.

There was a few brushfire wars, a few economic rollbacks. Some countries looked to the sea. Advances in materials science allowed deep underwater construction, prettying up the long-puffed pipe dream of hydrothermal generators.

The Lau Basin is dotted with these installations which harness subterranean heat to power half the Pacific Union. Hadley heads towards one of their relay stations. Unmanned, hopefully unwatched.

But a vain hope, surely. The Minnow had only the range to reach three such nodes, and only this one sits near Fiji. Though passive sonar failed to detect their subs, Hadley knows Atlantis is waiting.

It's a two hundred meters along the ridge, and Hadley crawls like a crippled sloth as his peg leg scrapes against stones. The cable is attached to a belt hoop so that he can better keep the black, crinkly PCM over him at all times. Not that there feels like there's any heat to hide. Even through his skinsuit the icy cold leaves his body dead numb, and in some near-fugue state he catches himself staring at his slowly trembling gloved hand and wondering who it belongs to. Strange aquatic baritones sing to him in gurgles.

The tower appears on the volcanic horizon like a fairy tail lair. Ocean blurs its thorny edges, but with a zoomed eye he sees the plethora of black electrical cables which stream in every direction as if the tall needle structure is the hub of a vast undersea spiderweb.

He reaches its base and finds a portal alcove embedded in structural latticework. After plugging the power cord into a charge outlet, he reads the weathered instructions (written in ten languages, five of which he knows) before pressing buttons on the ancient touchscreens which flood the airlock. Once the process is complete, he opens the door and half-crawls, half-swims into interior water.

A necessary evil: in his highly gas-saturated state, regular air pressure would burst him to blood sausages.

Waterproof florescents flicker on.The control room is a short titanium tunnel almost too low to stand in. Tarp floating around him like a toga, Hadley jacks his armwire into the relay mainframe as it stutters in the first boot-up it's likely seen in years. Moments later, his consciousness embraces the Web.

He and his niece have been cut off for a week. He scans the news. Implants in his hippocampus and prefrontal cortex translate data into semantic bites: Atlantis scientist head of child prostitution ring. Escapes arrest, kidnaps niece. Mass power outage. Three police wounded in shootout. Atlantis Security Chief Absolon vows to bring Dr. Mabella to justice.

Video feeds accompany the headlines, and as they stream through his audiovisual manifold, he realizes he should have anticipated this outrage. Of course they would lie. But why ruin his life? And what does any of this have to do with his sister in Baghdad?

The news includes a short clip of a distraught Kay describing the terrible things he made her do. The CGI is pixel perfect and would fool almost everyone, but to Hadley the teary brown eyes lack that inner luster.

Someone will pay for this, he decides, but then strangles his anger and gets to work.

He could have done this in the Atlantis airlock, but from the inside it would have been too easy to detect: he's no ace hacker. He pauses, allowing himself to plan, to prepare. He knows enough to hide his address behind multiple proxies. That will buy him a few minutes. He hopes it's enough.

He accesses Atlantis' network, slips through a backdoor and triggers his neural accelerators. With compartmentalized precision, imagination and speed, he conjures his and Kay's new lives: names, places of birth, Global Security Numbers. He forges and backdates financial and medical records and, after using his ICE implants to crack the personnel database, authorizes his creations and disperses them to government offices throughout the world.

The false identities won't stand up to scrutiny, but it's the best he can do.

~You disappoint me, Dr. Mabella, says a voice in his auditory cortex. A ghostly face appears, a transmitted hallucination seeming to hover before the bulkhead's antiquated controls. The man is bald, nut brown and smiling with the confidence that comes from knowing one holds the high water.

~I expected a game of cat and fish, he continues, yet you swam right into the net.

Hadley uses the tower's dish to relay his reply. ~Have you come to murder me, Lieutenant Darmadi?

The Atlantis naval officer feigns a hurt expression. His cybernetic eyes are a wrong baby blue that even Hadley knows is out of style. The coffin-sized bridge of an attack midget-sub crowds his background.

~I've come to arrest you. You're a sick man, a pervert.

~If you believe that, I have a beanstalk to sell you.

A rueful laugh. ~Well, whatever it is you did, must have pissed off the President--or her handlers. It happens. You and Kay come out, and I'll pick you both up. We'll return to Atlantis and figure things out together, all right?

No reason to blow up a relay tower to kill one man. That's the only reason Hadley's still alive. Hopefully, Darmadi doesn't see the Minnow. Or the power cord.

The passive sonar reveals four small drones diving, circling. Still linked to the Atlantis network, Hadley triggers a second neural accelerant (the nootropic rush leaves him lightheaded and shivering) and scours its database for anything related to 2050s-era hydrothermal generator safety overrides. Two seconds later--and after a slew of bashed firewalls--he finds what he needs.

~We're on our way out, Hadley says as he monitors the drones' progress. Less than a hundred meters away, like birds of prey they swoop on the hatchway, ready to shoot as soon as he appears. To stall, he adds, ~My niece is really hurt. Do you have a medical bay?

~We'll take care of her. Just come on out.

The drones stop and float expectantly at fifty meters. That'll have to do.

The relay tower is outfitted with a simple shock defense, just enough to discourage any overlarge and over-curious marine life. The circuit is routed through a transformer which dampens the charge to a reasonable voltage. Hadley doesn't want reasonable. He inputs a code into the mainframe. The transformer shuts down.

The interior should be insulated, but then again, the tower is nearly forty years old. But if the insulation fails, Hadley will never know and therefore he need not worry. With a thought, he activates the defensive grid.

Seven hundred thousand volts. A muffled pop as fuses are blown, then darkness. No more Web. Hadley retracts his armwire and adjusts his eyes to thermal, rendering the lifeless maintenance room in mechanical blacks and blues that smother residual yellows. Half of Fiji may be without power.

He works the airlock's small emergency lever with a wired, trembling diligence that doesn't quite ignite into panic. The drones may still be active. If not, the midget-sub will doubtless avenge them with a torpedo barrage.

With a watery clank, the portal door slides open, and Hadley pushes himself outside, awkwardly banging his peg-leg on the titanium frame. He switches back to light-enhancement: the drones are fried; they drift and sink stiffly like a quartet of petrified mantas.

Now is not the time for stealthy crawls, so he swims between clumsy hops and hobbles across the rocky undersea terrain. The cold gnaws at him. His tarp is the ludicrous cape of a failed superhero.

For all his augmented intellect, he laments that he stumbles crippled on an ocean floor, seconds from obliteration. He will die without answers. His only chance now is his stim-cranked, half-dead twelve year old niece.

He wonders if he dies and she surrenders, would Darmadi let her live? Hadley thought the man was a toady lick-spittle, but he never struck him as a child murderer. On the other hand, Darmadi wouldn't have to worry about any lingering feeling of guilt. There are pharmaceutical solutions for that.

Hadley crests a boulder and sees in the midnight blue a pale whale coasting towards him. No! he thinks but cannot cry. Run away! Run to Fiji!

The Minnow veers to starboard and out its open moon pool drops three small pods that glimmer like pearls. A heartbeat, and they erupt into tiny, blazing white suns wreathed in steam.

As if from nowhere, two torpedoes streak by meters above his head, their bubbly contrails swerving wildly as the homemade ECC beacons' heat and radio noise scrambles their guidance. Something rumbles the earth, and Hadley looks back to witness the relay tower's death throes. Light and frothed water burst the maintenance room and surrounding latticework to tumbling scraps. Only fifty meters away, the tall, pointed spire begins a slow, twisting topple. Towards Hadley.

Another explosion. Closer. A giant scalding hand slaps Hadley into rocks, and he bounces up dizzy and spinning in an outer space of fire and ice.

His goggles are shattered, and in the frigid water his bleeding blinks scratch polymer shards against artificial eyes. His skin blazes with agony. His ribs ache; his lung implant shifts loose and wet. He can't quite breathe.

The pain and fear he shuts off, but he still doesn't know up from down. Through pink fog he watches oceanic pressures stunt nearby blasts to flashy muffles. Void and lights swirl. Shockwaves dance him like a submerged marionette.

Something sleek and looming slams him in the side, and he slides along smooth, hard ice. A small hand tugs weakly at his shoulder. He reaches out, finds a cold metal bar and pulls.

The inside of the Minnow is dimly lit and tilted, part-flooded from the open moon pool. Knee-deep in water, eyes red from crying, Kay grabs him in a one-armed hug and with slipping feet tries to drag him aboard. He grips the deck-grates, tugs off his hood and coughs blood. He shuts down his lung implant and hopes that's enough.

The craft trembles from nearby shockwaves.

"More torpedoes are on the way!" Kay cries in a helium-shriek as she tosses another beacon into the portal, dramatically, as if spiking an American football. She dumps another one. And another.

Her bandaged, aching arm leaves her limping Igor-like as she splashes to the cockpit and sits in the pilot seat. The sub's starboard lean quickens the gush through the deck's gaping door.

"Close the iris!" Hadley shouts high-pitched as ocean smacks him against the bulkhead. The door snap shut. His peg-leg is loose like a tooth, so he doesn't bother standing but rather claws forward and climbs to sit beside his niece.

He jacks in his armwire, takes control and switches on the evac-pumps, but the cockpit's still half-submerged as the Minnow dives along the northern slope of the volcano. Good thing the controls are waterproof. Through sonar he watches debris from the smashed tower pursue downward like a slow-motion meteor shower. A cluster of smaller dots outpace them, but the beacons do their job. One by one the torpedoes swerve, flash and disappear.

Hadley waits until they're coasting along one of the Lau Basin's many narrow, twisting canyons, about 3,500 meters down, before deciding they're relatively safe. He takes stock of the situation.

First or second degree burns, probably. Maybe some broken ribs, internal bleeding. He'll need stitches for his eyelids. As for the sub, the tower's electrical surge damaged the battery, but the charge is enough that they should make it to Fiji if they're careful.

He powers down until they run all but silent.

Reclined in the foam chair, Kay's thin legs shiver. Her teeth chatter. Her eyes jitter and weep in the near-darkness. Hadley allows himself the feeling of guilt because he knows he deserves it. The amphetamines must be a nightmare for her young neurochemistry.

"You saved my life. Thank you," he says and gently ruffles her hair. Then, "I've started our decompression. Your ears may pop for a while, but in a week we'll be ready for normal air pressure. The HPNS-symptoms should subside, and of course we'll stop sounding like chipmunks."

That last part was intended to be humorous. It doesn't work.

"What about food?" she asks bleakly. "We're almost out."

He nods back at the freezer, where his severed leg and Absolon's hand are stored.

Her helium-laugh is a kitten's sneeze.

"Haddy, that's gross!"

To be continued . . .

JMHthe3rd · Dec 4, 2014

Back to Index

Domain Master CYOA

Alchera of the Dreaming Sky

Affinity:
Air, Illusion, Mystic

The Dreaming Sky

A dreamlike domain of spacious skies pebbled with floating islands and spherical lakes. Gravity is a suggestion, easily extinguished. Populated mostly by Sylphs. Located in the Plane of Air yet existing simultaneously in the Astral Realm, the skyscape is both difficult to locate and readily mailable to magic. Alchera rules from an ancient island-palace displaced millennia ago from the Material World.

Size Class
Average

Race
Celestial/Air Elemental (Hybrid)

Boss Perks: 8 shards (+1 Adaptation, +1 Nemesis)

Magical Prowess
Charisma Prowess
Enchanted Weapon (Scepter)
Phylactery
Arena Manipulation
Hybrid (Celestial/Air Elemental)
Empowerment (x2, Illusion, Mystic)
Shapeshifting
Morphing (Air Elemental, Behemoth)

Three thousand years ago, an aristocratic Solar Angel maiden got into a tryst with a sylph sorcerer. And thus Alchera was born. Such miscegenation scandalized Angelic high-society, but Alchera's mother loved her bastard son without shame. In time, she married into a respected Solar family, and Alchera was accepted as one of their own.

Growing up, Alchera found life unsatisfying in the Celestial Plane, and so he gathered a retinue of (lesser) Angelics and engaged in an exploratory expedition. After many adventures, they discovered an isolated, Astrally-infused domain in the Plane of Air, and he decided to declare it an Angelic 'colony,' taking up residence in an abandoned palace he found. The natives (mostly sylphs) were initially concerned at this overt filibustering, but Alchera soon proved too benevolent (and lazy) to be a true tyrant. So, if the silly half-breed Angel wants to call himself their lord, that's fine by them.

A few centuries pass uneventfully, but then humans start showing up . . .

While he lacks a full-blooded Solar's strength or combat prowess, Alchera excels at magic and elemental attacks (Air, with some Water and Fire). Normally, he's male, but with all his illusion and shapeshifting abilities, he's whatever gender he wants.

Companions

Devilgirl Taraka

Affinity: Air, Dark, Tempest (Empowerment x2)
Size Class: Average
Race: Demon [Succubus], Air Elemental (Hybrid)
Enchanted Weapon: Dragonbone Zweihander.
Morphing: Monstrous, Behemoth

Attache' sent by Lady Lilim of the Seventh Chaos. Joined to fight the so-called Skeleton King, who in truth is only a pawn of Demonlord Abaddon. Mother was a Sylph, and thus has a natural affinity for the Air College. Likes Alchera, despite their differences of alignment. Annoys the Celestials with loud devil music played on her electric lute. Fights with her father's sword. Has a love/hate relationship with her older sister, who's currently in league with Abaddon.

Professor Rockhard

Affinity: Earth, Mystic, Technology (Empowerment x2)
Size Class: Average
Race: Human, Celestial (Hybrid--Instilled with Alchera's essence.)
Enchanted Weapon: Alchemical Blunderbuss
Morphing: Earth Elemental, Giant

Twenty year veteran of the Zapaport Army. His war engines broke the defenses at the Siege of Helistad. Was Master Engineer until relieved due to his "far out" ideas. Taught advanced-alchemy at ZU until the Skeleton King showed up. Proved his inter-realm theories correct with the invention of the portal ring. Master of the Earth College. Thankful for Alchera's generosity, but think's he's a sissy boy. Has a foul temper when drinking, which is always.

Realm Perks: Hidden, Separate (Dreamplane)

Complications: Undead, Traitor (+10 tokens); Nemesis, Adaptation (+2 shards); Apocalypse (+2 Companions)

Minions (Humanoid, Celestial, Air Elemental, Draconic/Petite, Average, Giant, Behemoth)
15 tokens +10 (Necromancer, Traitor) = 25 tokens

Minion Perks: Diverse (x2), Talented: Enchanting
(-2 tokens)

Astral Devas: (Average) Angel race. Native to the Celestial Realm. Make good soldiers.
Movanic Devas: (Petite) Angel race. Make good mages.
Azatas: (Petite-Average) Non-angelic Celestial race. A minority, but diverse. Make good mages and priests.

Dragonborn: (Average) Humanoid dragonkin. A sizable minority of the realm. Make good soldiers.
(Air) Wyvern: (Giant) A breed of dragon native to the Plane of Air. Semi-sentient. Have native air magic attacks.
Steel Dragons: (Behemoth) Native to the realm, but very rare. Intelligent. Very big and powerful. Frequently take human form.

Sylph: (Petite) Fay elemental spirits native to the realm. Very fast. Make good mages.
Air Elementals: (Various sizes) Native and ubiquitous throughout the realm. Usually not tame enough to be useful in the army.

Elves: A minority in the realm. Mostly extra-planer travelers who settled down.
Humans: Annoying refugees from the City of Zapaport
Ogres: (Giant) A minority in the realm. Stupid, but useful if trained.

Mooks

Guards x3 (55 Humans, 10 Dragonborn, 5 Ogres, 5 Astral Devas) +75
Soldiers x5 (100 Humans, 15 Dragonborn, 5 Ogres, 5 Astral Devas) +125
Mages (10 Sylphs, 10 Movanic Devas, 5 Azata [Yamah]) +25
Scouts (Sylphs) +25
Spies (15 Sylphs, 7 Humanoids [5 Elves, 2 Humans], 2 Astral Devas, 1 Azata [Lyrakien]) +25
Servants (18 Human, 4 Elves, 3 Sylphs) +25
Clerics (18 Movanic Devas, 7 Azatas [Lillend]) +25
Merchants (Human Average) +25

(-14 tokens)

Elites

Priests (4 Movanic Devas, 6 Azatas [Lillend]) +10
Agents (3 Sylphs, 3 Humanoids [2 Elves, 1 Human] , 3 Azatas [Yamah], 1 Movanic Devas) +10
Warriors (2 Dragonborn, 2 Ogres, 2 Air Wyvern, 2 Air Elemental Behemoths, 1 Azatas [Ghaele], 1 Steel Dragon) +10
Battlemages (3 Sylphs, 7 Movanic Devas) +10

(-4 Tokens)

Lieutenants

Archmage Darumulum (Sylph) +1
Chosen Paladin Brono (Dragonborn) +1
The Witch Ragana (Elf) +1
Oracle Ao (Movanic Deva, Alchera's girlfriend) +1

(-4 Tokens)

Estimated Population of Domain: ~40,000

The General Idea:
My realm used to be Hidden and Unknown. The only way to reach it was to smoke a particularly rare psychoactive herb on a full moon at midnight. My only visitors were hapless potheads, and who's going to believe them?

And I didn't mind. Isolation can be peaceful, and I enjoyed playing the benevolent autocrat of my little pocket realm. And giving guided tours to stupid druggie humans was always a lot of fun. I gave them tea and cookies. They watched my scrying ball. And when the drug wore off and they went back to the City of Zapaport in the material realm below, no one was wiser.

However, a few of the druggies decided to get all scientific. They noticed that this supposed hallucination was shared among them, and only when they smoked on specific times of the day and month. Soon, they figured it out, and told their friends. Well, I was annoyed, but they promised to keep their discovery under wraps. Stoners became regular visitors in my realm, but they didn't stir up too much trouble.

But then that Skeleton King showed and began zombifying the citizens of Zapaport. Most of the humans either fled or were turned, but many went into hiding. Some of the potheads were among them. Desperate for safety, they told an alchemical engineer named Professor Rockhard about my realm and, using both the sacred herb and his knowledge of arcane astral-mechanics, he built a portal ring and . . . in swarmed the refugees.

Damn dirty humans. Thousands of them.

I really couldn't turn them away, since they had no where to go and I'd just look like a dick. I mean, I am a Celestial. Lawful Good and all that.

But still, my realm's become a refugee camp. And look what they did to my lawn! And they just throw their trash in the streets. Most of them are just thieves anyway.

And now that Skeleton King's trying to summon some sort of Doomsday Death God or something, and has apparently conspired to put me on some demon's shit list. And, if Ao is to be believed, I have traitors in my midst. Lovely. And it's not like I have many allies to count on. Jareth the Goblin King's in my astrally-adjacent realm, and his army was defeated by a sixteen year old girl!

But at least my Solar family has tossed me a shard, and I managed to snatch that other shard from the city castle before Mr. Skeleton got his bony fingers on it. And some of the humans are pulling their weight--or at least trying to--filing out the ranks of my budding army. And despite his rather rough appearance, Professor Rockhard has proved a so adept a mage (he's a credit to his race!) that I've found I could bestow him a modicum of my essence.

And there's Devilgirl Taraka, my token evil teammate. It seems there's a war in hell, and she means to make sure the right side wins. An alliance of convenience, for sure, but she is pretty cute . . .

Since the only way into my realm is a single portal in a sewer deep in the bowels of Zapaport, my defenses are pretty secure. If there's a breach, I'll use the numerous humans to hold the line while the heavy hitters go in with the attack.

Of course, it's possible, though unlikely, for someone to "map out" the surrounding realmscape and find an alternate way into my domain. To counter that I use my scouts to patrol the border and my spies to see what the Skeleton King's up to.

JMHthe3rd · Dec 4, 2014

Back to Index

Golden Horde CYOA

Jungso-Husun Khan
Age: 21

Gifts and Flaws

War Wounds [+1]

Herds and Banners

Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry) [-5]
Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry) [-5]
Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry, Drudges +1) [-4]
Food Herd (+2,000 Infantry, Tinkers -1) [-6]
Food Herd (+2,000 Infantry, Watchdogs -2, War Wagons -8) [-15]
Swift Herd (+500 Light Cavalry, Paragon -3, Kheshiks -4) [-13]
Swift Herd [Maral's] (+500 Light Cavalry, Rapter -2) [-8]
Hunter Herd [Jaliqai's] (+300 Moon Bear Cavalry, Monstrous -3) [-11]

Retinue

Clan Siblings x2 [-10]

Jaliqui-Husun
(Archer)
Age: 21

Jungso's beloved twin sister. Leads the Husun Clan's Moon Bear Cavalry. Deadly with a bow. Charismatic and cunning, but also vainglorious and bloodthirsty. Needs to be reigned in occasionally, lest she charge into fights she can't handle.

Was instrumental in saving her brother during Arasen's attempted coup, maiming the wicked cousin and driving his forces from the camp. Has a steel-strong bond with Jungso, though believes his spiritual inclinations are foolish and that she should be in charge. Refuses to marry. Prefers the company of women.

Maral-Husun
(Horselord, One Eye)
Age: 17

Jungso's half-sister. Gets her fair features from her mother, who was the daughter of a boyar in one of the Serjan Principalities to the west. Leads one of the Swift Herds. Preternaturally gifted in mathematics as well as chess and the harp. Friends with the Hostage Princess and Engineer. Has an seemingly mystical bond with horses. Her intelligence and cautious nature allows her to excel in scouting and surprise skirmish attacks. Her men adore her and treat her more as a mascot than a leader, though her strategic thinking is always invaluable.

During the coup, Maral drew her blade against Arasen when he approached the yurt where Jungso lay wounded. She was no match for her wicked cousin, however, and after disarming her he crushed her eye with his sword pommel. Though she doesn't complain, she was proud of her looks and thinks her missing eye makes her ugly. Very close to her brother, is his unofficial adviser.

Strategic Consort (+50 Light Cavalry) [-4]
Beast Shaman [-6]
Hostage Princess [-4]
Hostage Engineer [-7]
Hostage Eunuch [-3]
Welkin Witch (An-Zan, Jungso's mother) [-5]
Mummified Abbot (Youta) [-6]
Outlaw Oathbreaker [-3]

Artifacts

Stele of the Fallen Empire [-5]

State of the Steppe

Blood Enemy (Arasen-Usun Khan) [+9]

Arasen Usun Khan
Age: 26

Gifts and Flaws

Grappler [-1]
Intimidating [-1]
Footlame [+1]
Rage [+1]

Herds and Banners

Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry, Drudges) [-4]
Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry, Drudges) [-4]
Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry) [-5]
Common Herd (+1,000 Cavalry, Watchdogs, War Wagons) [-15]
Food Herd (+2,000 Infantry, Drudges) [-4]
Food Herd (+2,000 Infantry, Watchdogs, Tinkers) [-8]
Swift Herd (+500 Light Cavalry) [-6]
Swift Herd (+500 Light Cavalry, Raptors, Paragon, Keshiks) [-15]

Retinue

Condor Kings [-8]

State of the Steppe

Blood Enemy [+9]
Savage Competition [+5]

Beyond the Steppe

The West: The Army of Fire [+8]
The North: Frozen Graveyard [-1]
The East: Inland Lake [-2]

Total Points: 50

Total forces:

4,000 Cavalry
4,000 Infantry
1,000 Light Cavalry

Savage Competition [+5]

Beyond the Steppe

The West: The Army of Fire [+8]
The North: Frozen Graveyard [-1]
The East: Inland Lake [-2]

The Empire

Threshold

The Wall
Great River

Complications

Famine and Unrest

The Grand Marshall

The Polymath

Total Points: 100

Total Forces:

4,000 Cavalry
3,000 Infantry
1,050 Light Cavalry
300 Moon Bear Cavalry

Born of a former Imperial Witch-turned consort, Jungso grew up on stories of the Empire's past glory, and despite the fact that his father, the great Jungdu Khan, hated their decadent ways, young Jungso found he admired their accomplishments. They offered something life on the steppe never could: stability, progress.

Jungso proved competent in marshal skills, but they held for him little interest. Through his mother he learned to read, and though he had poor talent for the art, he grew obsessed with the metaphysics of magic. His teenage years were spent studying demonology, ancient cults and shamanic practices in a desperate attempt to derive enlightenment. But while both his father, brother and twin sister derided these pursuits as foolishness, his mother encouraged them, for in the water and blood of her divinations she saw great things for her son.

The red pox struck without warning. Jungdu Khan had little time to grieve the death of his eldest son, Jungsai, for within three days the Khan himself was perished. And so Jungso found himself the the new Khan of the Husun Clan.

But his uncle, Amasar Khan of the Usun Clan, would not have this. For he said twenty years ago, under the Treaty of Mount Khulan, his brother swore an oath that, should Jungsai die without issue, Amasar's bloodline would inherit the Husun Clan, thus reuniting the two split clans into one.

Well, Jungso had never heard this before and neither had anyone else. Bolstered by his mother's faith in his destiny, Jungso challenged Amasar to a duel to the death for leadership of the clan. Jungso proved a ill match for Amasar's prowess with a saber, and it was not long before Jungso was on his kneels, cradling his intestines as they spilled from his belly.

Amasar took this opportunity to laugh and gloat before the gathered crowd, proclaiming Jungso the half-breed welp of an Imperial witch. Jungso took this opportunity to pull a dagger from his boot and stab his uncle in the genitalia.

Half-dead from blood loss, Jungso's cuts were clumsy. Amasar died slow.

Amasar's son, Arasen, flew into a mad rage. Though the two clans were present under a banner of truce, Arasen lead the Usuns in an attack of vengeance to wipe out the Husun family. Fortunately, Jaliqui's Moon Bear Cavalry intercepted Arasen just as he reached Jungso's yurt. Her own monstrous mount shredded her cousin's knee before his bodyguards could carry him to safety.

The Usun Clan was driven out, but Jungso was feared mortally wounded. His wounds festered, and he thrashed in a fevered sleep as mystical visions overtook his soul. For three nights, Jungso's mother knelt before her son in silent vigil and prayed to the God Guanyin that his destiny not be denied.

On the third night an ancient, stick-thin man appeared. Claiming he was summoned in a dream, the man introduced himself as Youta, a priest from a land far to the East. Using secret medicines and unpronounceable incantations, Youta healed Jungso, saying that the young Khan had a role in the world that he had yet to play.

And so Jungso rose from his sickbed, forever weakened in constitution, but well enough. Inspired by his dreams, he led an expedition north to a frozen bog full of the bones of great beasts. On the remote edge of the bog his clan found a half-sunken tower, and inside the tower they found an ancient obelisk engraved with strange writings, along with a library of thousands of stone tablets, many with etchings of strange machinery.

Together, the Imperial Engineer (who escaped the Usan Clan during the coup), the Princess and the Eunuch attempted to make sense of the language, though Jungso, under the advice of his mother and Youta, knew the gods led him here for a reason: the Empire is dying, and a great army rises in a West. Only the past can save the future, and with these lost arts the Steppe and Empire must unite. There must be stability; there must be progress.

Since then Jungso has entered a marriage alliance with the Bartu Clan and taken on a Beast Shaman who, while unhappy with Jungso's witch mother and foreign priest, has agreed to teach his craft. Jaliqui is training to become a skin-changer, so she can be a bear while she rides a bear, which would be awesome. The engineer is using the stone tablets to build great engines of destruction. There's a wall to knock down, a river to cross, and they say the Empire's Grand Marshall is an elderly bureaucrat-wizard who employs ancient mechanical crafts of his own.

A bitter war is coming, but Jungso knows the gods are on his side.

JMHthe3rd · Dec 4, 2014

Back to Index

Post-Apocalyptic Settlement CYOA

Dr. James Marlin Howell
Fort White Rock
North Texas
A.D. 2037

Apocalypse: Nuclear Armageddon

Shelter: Bunker

Buildings

Water Treatment Plant [Free]
Clinic [-20]
Common House [-15]
Generator Room [-30]
Hotel [-15]
House [-7]
Outhouse [-5]
Shack [-4]
Solar Array: [-50]
Store [-15]
Town Hall [-25]
Tavern [-15]
Barricade Level 3 [-30]

Perks

Armory
Center of Commerce
Drugs and Alcohol
- Drugs: cannabis, peyote, methamphetamines, psilocybin mushrooms.
- Alcohol: Jack Daniels, vodka, wine.
Medic
Natural Leader

Mechanics

Jaime [-10]

Doctors

Doc Michaels [-20]
Lucy [-10]

Cooks

Kyle van der Linde [-3]

Muscle

Benjamin Chambers [-9]
Clover [-8]
Danny [-6]
Lt. Murri Holden [-5]
Cpt. Zack Holden [-5]
Major Katherine Howell (Texas Rangers) [-18]
Vincent Vega [-5]

Merchants

Pauli [-10]
Felicia [-15]

Misc

Animal Trainer x4 [-60]
Worker [-10]
Farmer [-5]

Animals

Chickens x6
Cow & Bull
Dogs x2 (Male & Female)
Horses x2 (Male & Female)

Flaws

Raiders [+15]
Slavers [+15]

Background

Situated beside White Rock Creek near the ruins of Frisco, Texas, the underground bunker had been the home for the Five Families for over fifty years. This all changed when the Steel Khans struck. A gang of nomadic marauders from the north, they had been spying on the bunker for months, biding their time for the opportune moment.

A bit of sabotage and a careless sentry was all it took. The Khans stormed the fort in the dead of night, killing all who resisted and imprisoning the rest. When the Khan's leader, "King Khan," learned of Dr. Howell's knowledge of chemistry, he insisted he cook crystal meth for them. His face beaten black and blue, blood gushing from a ruptured eye, Dr. Howell tried to explain that he'd never done this before; he wouldn't know where to start. King Khan held a machete to his pregnant wife's throat and told him he better learn fast.

Dr. Howell did learn, but not fast enough. A week later, King Khan accused him of stalling. That day, the doctor learned his child would have been a daughter.

And so with a bunker full of hostages as motivation, Dr. Howell perfected his assigned craft. Months passed, and the Steel Khans were no longer nomads but had decided to settle and grow. Around the bunker they built a small town. They raised walls and raided livestock; they traded drugs and slaves and warred with the Republic of Texas.

King Khan was very pleased, for now he was truly a king. His sons were princess, his daughters princesses. A thousand years from now they would build great statues of him and sings songs of his name.

But Dr. Howell was not as broken as he seemed. Nursing vengeance for his murdered family, the doctor squirreled away many drugs and chemicals and waited for the day he knew would come.

A year after the Khans arrived, Dr. Howell received a small scrap of paper from a passing merchant named, Pauli. Written in Latin, the message claimed to be from his little sister, Katherine, who ran away years ago to join the Texas Rangers. She was going to rescue him, but it would take time.

The Mexican War and the mutants out west had stretched the Rangers thin, and as much as she would wanted to, she lacked the manpower for a siege. If only there were a way to weaken the Khans from within. If only they could even the odds.

It took days to plan it out, but Dr. Howell wasn't the only one with a score to settle. He waited until the Khans held one of their many festivals, when most would be either high or drunk. Through the merchant spy he told his sister it would be tonight.

The chlorine and ammonia took care of the ones in the bunker; the rest succumbed to the cyanide in the whiskey. Not all perished, however. Before the party, Dr. Howell slipped King Khan vecuronium bromide, a powerful paralytic. The so-called king could only watch as his wives, children and men thrashed and died.

The few sober Khans were thrown into confusion and routed at sight of the Rangers. The day was saved. The bunker was free.

By unanimous vote, Dr. Howell was elected mayor of the newly founded town of Fort White Rock. Major Katherine Howell was attached as a military liaison to negotiate the community's acceptance into the Republic.

That was one year ago.

The Current Situation

Comprised of surviving members of the Five Families, freed slaves and newcomers, Fort White Rock is the biggest producer of methamphetamines in the North Texas territory. This is a source on contention for unification, since meth and other hard drugs are outlawed in most counties in the Republic. But Dr. Howell maintains White Rock doesn't have an income to replace the drug trade. The town's good at it, and there's much demand. Not ideal, but it could be worse.

When Katherine expresses her disapproval, the doctor only smiles and points out the phrase set in wrought iron above the town gates: De duobus malis, minus est semper eligendum.

Katherine can only shake her head at her brother's pretentiousness. In some ways he hasn't changed, in others . . .

There are raiders and slavers in the area, but Katherine's Rangers and the town's budding army pursue them with a crusader's zeal. For mercy's sake, Katherine tries to make sure none of the slavers are brought back alive. She doesn't like what her brother does to them.

Dr. Howell is for the most part a fair leader--inspiring, even--but behind that stuffy professor exterior lurks something hurt and crippled and sometimes cruel. He's grown fond of crucifixions and impalings, though such fates are usually reserved for those who arguably deserve it. Either way, the townsfolk don't mind. Some, like that poor, crazy Clover girl, seem to relish the executions.

There are some that even say King Khan never died, that he's kept locked in a cage deep in the bunker, blind and limbless and screaming day and night. Katherine has never asked, never looked.

The abuses of the Khans are too fresh on their minds, she knows, but it reminds her too much of something she once read, something about abysses and monsters.

JMHthe3rd · Dec 11, 2014

Back to Index

JUMPCHAIN CYOA

FALLOUT: PROJECT OSIRIS

Constructed beneath stately Villard Hall, Vault 9 served as a curiosity in the years leading to the war. Vault-Tec, in conjunction with the University of Oregon, frequently used its tunnels to showcase new technologies and promote civil defense.

But when the bombs fell and civilization perished, Vault 9 became the sanctuary for nearly a thousand students and faculty--all among America's brightest. For seventy years, they remained in isolation.

(Villard Hall, University of Oregon. Capitol Building of the Scientific Republic)

When the blast door finally rolled aside, they found the world changed, but not dead. Using their advanced pre-war knowledge, the people of the vault expanded from the university grounds to annex nearby settlements, forming in the process a new society where only the most intelligent rule.

The most intelligent being, of course, those who came from the vault.

The Scientific Republic of Lane County has thrived for over a century, but lately it's faced many challenges. Vikings raid the coast, Wolf Clans invade from the mountains. And to the south looms the New California Republic, a massive, expansionistic nation that seeks to absorb its neighbors.

Relations with the NCR have thus far been warm, but some fear this friendship may come with a price.

When a young woman arrives one day with an offer they can't refuse, these concerns become all but certain. Whatever happens now, nothing will ever be the same.

Dr. Martin Polakowski

Starting Value: 1,000 CP

Location: [Rolled 8, Your Choice] Eugene, Oregon, USA
Age: [Rolled 6, 20+6] 26
Origin: Vault Dweller [-100 CP]

Skill Tags

Energy Weapons [Start with laser pistol with 150 cells]
Repair [Start with toolkit]
Science [Start with lab coat and gloves]

Perks

Educated [Free, Vault Dweller]
Jury Rigging [Discount, Vault Dweller, -150 CP]
Certified Tech [Discount, Vault Dweller, -300 CP]

Equipment

Food Purifier [Free, Vault Dweller]
Medkit [-50 CP]
Radiation Survival Supplies [-100 CP]
Bag of Caps [10,000 caps, -200 CP]
Robot Butler [-100 CP]
Pipboy 2000 [Free, Vault Dweller]

Complications: None

Remaining CPs: 0

Appearance: Average height, slender frame. Expressive brown eyes hidden behind wide horn-rimmed glasses. Has a naive, youthful face belied by his his receding hairline. Frequently seen with a cigarette, fedora. Wears a lab coat two sizes too big.

Personality: Friendly and well liked, but keeps to himself. Socially awkward. Used to be obsessed with the Akashic Field Theory, but has since moved on. Voracious reader. Expert in robotics and directed-energy weapons. Best friends with Virgil, his Mister Handy unit.

Haunted by his father's murder of his mother. Takes anti-anxiety medication. Chain smokes. Has a crush on Lieutenant Valerie Mauritius, but too timid to do anything about it.

Background: Dr. Julian Manfredi was the first to admit that when he discovered his wife's affair, he reacted rashly. While Julian was a respected physicist, murder is a capital offense in the Republic, and the courts had no choice but to sentence him to death by lethal injection.

He escaped the next day and has not been heard from since.

In his flight, he left behind copious notes regarding an "Akashic Field Theory" which claims that a Jungian collective unconscious pervades all of reality, imprinting the past in hyper-dimensional space.

He also left behind a three year old son, named Martin.

Martin's maternal grandparents loved him and raised him well. He was a mild, assuming boy with an unquenchable thirst for science.

But during his teenage years he began to ask questions. Though he hated his father for what he had done, he want to know who the man was, whether there could be anything to admire, if not forgive. So deep in an university cellar, he rifled through archives until he found his father's papers.

At first, Martin was disappointed, for the Akashic Field Theory seemed the work of a madman. But the idea sparked his young imagination. Imagine if the past is still present! Imagine if this "cosmic library" could be accessed!

For a few years, he continued his father's work, experimenting with morphic-resonances, holographic entanglement and Bose-Einstein condensates. In the end, he lost heart, and with the new threat of the Wolf Clan Wars, he set his studies aside for more practical endeavors: robots and lasers. He never looked back.

On his twentieth birthday, Martin forsook "Manfredi" for "Polakowski," his mother's maiden name. His grandparents were so proud.

In charge of the Republic's Advanced Weaponry Laboratory, Martin is responsible for salvaging and maintaining pre-war combat assets. It's not the field he would have chosen, but he feels a duty to his country and enjoys his work with artificial intelligence. It's a good life.

But one day a woman from the NCR appears, speaking of a Project Osiris. Soon, Martin will learn that the past never dies, never changes.

JMHthe3rd · Dec 16, 2014

Back to Index

GOLDEN HORDE CYOA

The Tale of Jungso-Husun Khan and the Toadstool War

Chapter One: In Which Maral and Jaliqui Encounter the Bog People

Maral-Husun, Commander of the "Windy Zuu" Light Cavalry, half-sister to Jungso-Husun Khan

Early Winter, First Year of Jungso's Khanate
Far North Zelüzar, Kholdol Wastes

From the camps the two rode an hour east. White morning fog embraced them in languid sheets. Cold nipped at Maral's nose and cheeks. Her breath misted.

They tied Boo-Boo to a dead oak. The moon bear cried piteously, so they fed him raw steak before entering the wetland on foot.

Even frozen, the bog stank of brimstone. As she and Jaliqui stalked through snow and wilted grass, they passed iced-over pools under which suspended great shadowy forms grasping upwards in petrified death throes. Some were like boars, except too big and with scales. Some looked too much like people.

From somewhere ahead came faint, rolling titters that reminded Maral of cicadas--absurd, in this climate. The noise stopped, then started again. Jaliqui peered around but seemed unconcerned. Maral missed having that confidence.

After a short while, Jaliqui squatted. She slowly pointed and whispered, "There."

Maral had to turn her head too far to see. Her left side was her blind side. She had to get used to that.

The animal was like a hare with small antlers. It hopped lazily between two mounds of dead weeds and nibbled at a speck of mud. A twenty yard shot.

Carefully, Maral slid her recurve bow from the leather scabbard across her back. She drew an arrow from the quiver hanging from her belt and nocked it to the string. Though of a low draw-weight, it was master crafted, and the bamboo and horn yielded silently as she pulled back with her thumb ring. The critter sniffed snow, oblivious.

Jaliqui leaned close until their fur hats touched. "Wait until it moves. And remember what we talked about: use your third eye."

Maral nodded. While her sister was arguably not the best archer in the clan, at twenty-one she had bow-killed seven men and led who knows how many hunts. Still, the advice seemed bullshit. If you have one eye, you have one eye; imagining a mystical replacement won't grant depth perception.

But Maral was sick of being a half-blind cripple, and while she had proved far too blade-shy to relearn sword fighting, she vowed she will reclaim competence with a bow.

And so she watched as the hare dug through a patch of snow. With two eyes, she had gotten by on instinct: track and shoot. Now, she had to think and use the mathematics she so loved. As she adjusted her aim, she calculated distance, trajectory.

The cicadas waxed, and the hare hopped. Maral released. The string slapped her bracer. The shaft overshot by five feet and arced into fog.

Maral groaned. She almost threw her bow into the snow. "I used to be able to make that shot at three times the range."

Jaliqui hugged an arm across Maral's shoulders. Maral could feel her wiry strength flex through hide and fur.

"Be patient, little sister," Jaliqui said. "You'll get better."

"I may get better, but I'll never be good. Not like before."

Their faces so close, Maral could see the workings behind Jaliqui's brown eyes as she wracked her brain for something else positive to say. That it took so long told Maral all she needed to know.

"No," Jaliqui said finally, "but you don't need to be a master archer. You're not Dugar the Last. You're royalty in a fifty-thousand strong clan. We're family. We look out for each other."

Maral's cheeks burned against the crisp air. She tugged away from her sister's embrace and paced through dead grass and snow. She waved her bow as she spoke.

"You wouldn't be able to stand this if this happened to you. Arasel's left me too skittish to hold a sword, too blind to shoot straight. I'm useless. I'm not . . . I'm not even pretty anymore! Boys avoid me. Even Shiggi!"

Hands on hips, Jaliqui laughed. For a heartbeat Maral wanted to shoot her, but she'd just miss.

"You treat Shiggi like sour shit," her sister said, "so it's little wonder. But no, neither he nor anyone thinks you're anything other than adorable. Even I think you're prettier than me, if it makes you feel better."

Maral nearly protested, but decided it might be true. Or had been, anyway. Jaliqui spurned all men's advances, but there was little wonder why they still tried: she was beautiful with smooth teak skin and a sleek, athletic body. But Maral was more. Maral was exotic. Her mother was Serjan and had bequeathed her ginger hair, a milky white complexion and baby blue eyes as clear as the sky--of which only one was left.

The cicadas ceased. To make a point, Maral lifted her red leather eyepatch.

Jaliqui tried not to flinch, but then sighed. "All right, the empty socket's pretty gross. If you hate the patch so much, we can talk to Jungso when we get back. He can get one of the jewelers to make you a golden eye. Or maybe a silver one. Or how about a sapphire, if we could find one big enough . . ."

"Jungso's too busy with that old foreign priest," Maral said, kicking at a chink in the ice. The taps echoed in the fog. "I mean, I'm glad Youta saved him, but look where he's led us? We should be hunting down Arasel, not chasing dreams to the top of the world."

"What can we do?" Jaliqui said. "He's surrounded himself with fools and hardly ever sees us anymore. And at the end of the day, he's not only our brother, but our Khan." She smirked and looked away. "Remember, I was born not a quarter hour before him. If I had a cock in my trousers, I'd be leading this clan right now. And let me tell you, I wouldn't put up with all this 'vision quest' mumbo-jumbo. The men think this country's cursed. They're growing restless."

Words almost treasonous, but undeniable. Indeed, this was a strange, unclean land. And though Maral had told no one, she had been getting dreams too. Terrible nightmares that upon waking always slithered from memory.

"Hopefully," Jaliqui continued, "Jungso will find some holy stones or magic beans or whatever and we can finally--" She slapped the side of her neck and tugged away a thin wooden splinter. It was a finger long with a tip smeared in dark goo.

Maral ducked and scanned the white fog. Jaliqui had already drawn her saber and ran shouting towards where the dart shot from. The man leaped out like a phantom. Squat, lumpy and dressed in an animal loincloth, he wielded in one hand a bamboo stick and in the other a big flint knife. Jaliqui's slashed him across the chest and he fell screaming.

Two more closed from opposite sides, one fat, one scrawny, both ape-hairy. They looked to their fallen friend before stopping and eyeing the two women. Apprehension shone in their bearded piggy faces. They gripped ugly stone clubs.

Jaliqui raised her curved sword in a guard position and, keeping both in sight, back-stepped close to Maral. Jaliqui's face snarled, but the blade waved uncertainly in her hand. She wobbled on her feet.

Aside from her bow, Maral's only weapon was a small dagger in her boot. But at ten yards even she should be able to hit the fat one. She pulled an arrow from her quiver.

A bestial roar thundered through the air. Boo-Boo. Boo-Boo in pain. Jaliqui turned and nearly slipped in the ice. The scrawny man hurled a rock with his free hand. It cracked against the back of her fur hat, and she collapsed.

Maral nocked and drew, but the fat man was already charging, already upon her. Her shot flew wild. His club swiped viciously, the stone head cracking her bow in two. She tripped backwards into the snow.

The fat man's growl revealed a crooked, brown maw. His drooped, lopsided eyes leered into her own from a face deformed by boils. On her back, Maral tried to scurry away. He grabbed at her head and tugged off her cap, spilling loose long red hair down her shoulders. For a moment the fat man stood over her, blinking in bewilderment. Maral snatched out her dagger and plunged the curved blade into his flabby gut.

He howled and punched her cheek. Her head plowed into snow. Stars flashed. In a dizzy undersea world she found herself crawling and searching as the monster screamed behind her. A hand grabbed her boot. She kicked at it. She was searching for something. Something she needed.

Somewhere, another Boo-Boo cry.

Maral scampered across the snow on all fours, the quiver at her belt catching on the earth. The right side of her face ached. Her brain bobbed loose in her skull. Jaliqui lay only a few feet away, her saber by her hand. But the skinny man was already close, barking curses in a savage tongue.

Maral gripped the hilt. Standing astride her sister, the scrawny man stomped down on the sword. But ice is slippery. Maral tilted up the blade and pulled with all her might, slicing open his moccasined sole as she drew the weapon free. He tumbled back yowling.

Behind her, the fat man was doubled over yet still lurching after her as he clutched his skewered belly. He glared with animal hatred. He waved his club one-handed.

Maral rose unsteadily to her feet. She felt faint, and sudden worry about Jaliqui threatened to overtake her. But she remembered her years of training and stilled her soul. Though the saber was a little heavier than she was used to, it was balanced and slender. She stamped forward and extended with a quick slash. The fat man's fingers flew. The club fell from a gushing paw.

He shrieked at his mutilation. She sidestepped and aimed another cut. He flopped into the snow, neck spewing.

Afraid the scrawny man might slip into her blind spot, she twirled around, the movement making her sick. She needn't have worried. He stared crazy-eyed at the blood-soaked saber. Maral raised the blade and bared her teeth. He ran away limping.

Maral was about to reach for the bow strapped to Jaliqui's back when the man screamed. She looked up in time to see him land on the ground, half ripped in two, his viscera splattered as if in a messy sacrifice. The hulking shape of Boo-Boo sauntered out of the fog. A wound bled from the moon bear's side. A snapped rope dragged from his reins.

He spotted Jaliqui and raced over to sniff her. He moaned sadly. Maral bent over, vomited and, after wiping her mouth and spitting, knelt by her sister's side. She was alive and breathing more or less regularly, but she wouldn't wake. Maral prayed to Eju that the poison wasn't deadly. Or the rock wouldn't fever her brain.

The man Jaliqui had slashed whimpered in a curled ball as his blood steamed in the snow. Maral gave him no mercy but spotted a small, curved horn attached to his loincloth. She snatched it away and, after turning it over in her hands, blew into the small end.

Cicadas.

Time to hurry. There might be more on the way. And the sooner she gets her sister to Youta, the better.

After she clumsily slung Jaliqui across Boo-Boo's back and secured her in place, she climbed in the saddle and began the journey back. Maral had a special way with horses, not bears, but her sister's mount seemed to know the way. Which was good because soon Maral's cheek swelled so much she couldn't see. Amid the headache misery, her mind wandered.

Today she'd killed her first man--if you could call him a man. But moreover, she realized this was the first time she successfully wielded a sword since she tried to defend Jungso from their mad cousin. After that humiliation, every time she sparred, the raw memory of Arasen-Usun swatting her blade aside and plunging his pommel into her eye sent her into a trembling panic.

"A little half-breed girl playing at warrior . . . There's a price for such presumption."

Maral knew she had reclaimed something of herself today. She hoped the price wasn't her sister's life.

To be continued . . .

JMHthe3rd · Dec 24, 2014

Back to Index

NECROMANCER CYOA

Jon Huffingwell
of the Huffingwell Hotel

Grimoire: Spectral (Spiritele ei Bine, Nadya Kot)

Nadya Kot was a young peasant child who lived on a farm in Southern Serja. On her ninth birthday, a gypsy clown lured her to a wagon where she was fed poisoned pie. Nadya was still conscious as they eviscerated her, using a blood ritual to bind her soul the pages of the Spiritele ei Bine.

For fifty years, she has ensnared spirits and compelled them to obey her masters. She has seen other planes. She has witnessed the hearts of angels and demons. Though she now feels more at home in the netherworld than the land of living, she still wishes to inhabit a body. She want to grow up. She wants a life.

Huffingwell is her friend, though she fears his obsession with Vipraksa's Grimoire has blinded him.

Clothes: Foppish [-2 Gold]
Immortality: Soul Well
Lair: Dilapidated Inn (-1 Gold, -4 for Renovation) [-5 Gold]

Companion: Boyaress Kasandra Khernov

Kasandra was an aging noblewoman who secretly dabbled in necromancy. Desperate for eternal youth, she ventured into the university's catacombs to seek the Skeleton King's Tomb. There, she discovered an ancient stone door shrouded from sight by a subtle vitare enchantment. She prepared a spell to disperse the illusion and . . .

. . . she was a ghost. She didn't even remember how she died, and for some reason her spirit was blocked from reentering the catacombs to find out. For over two hundred years she was trapped on the campus grounds, imperceivable to the living except as a chilly presence and an occasional apparition.

The world changed around her. From the clock tower, she watched the Zapaport bay as masts and sails gave way to smokestacks and steam. Ugly square buildings sprouted along the horizon. The sky darkened with coal.

Then one day a chubby young man entered the university carrying a Ouija board. Because he called out her name, she was able to speak to him. He told her he'd found her diary in the university archives. He knew that she too sought Vipraksa's Grimoire.

His name was Jon. He asked for her help.

Well, it's not like she had anything else to do.

Using the Ritual of Spiritus Libertas, he managed to free her from the campus, and they returned to together to his hotel.

She finds Huffingwell to be a very talented young necromancer, but his knowledge is unbalanced: he knows advanced techniques, but is ignorant of the basics. She also sees him as a fool, but believes he'll keep his word.

As for Vipraksa's Grimoire, two centuries of imprisonment has tempered her ambitions. The tomb's protected by powerful magic, and it's not worth the risks. As soon as Huffingwell fulfills his promise of finding her a new body--a young one, a pretty one--she'll leave him and start a new life.

Minions

Shade (x3) [-18 Gold]
Armored Spirit (x2) [-12 Gold]
Bestial Spirits (x2, 10 hounds, 1 direwolf) [-4 Gold]
Scheming Spirits [-14 Gold]
Vessel (for Kasandra) [-4 Gold]
Vessel (for Nadya) [-2 Gold]

Selena Belinski (Amateur Witch, goes by the name, "Selena Ravensorrow") [-3 Gold]

An alchemy student at the university. Gifted in the Nature College, but more interested in the forbidden art of necromancy. One-quarter elf, but tells everyone she's half. Hangs out at the Moondust Coffeehouse where she reads bad poetry and writes worse. Likes ghosts and graveyards. Dresses in black. Wears tacky jewelry.

Spotting Huffingwell wandering she campus, she followed him until she was sure what he was up to. She then offered to become his apprentice. Is a huge Chandrakanta fangirl, and so is very excited about finding Vipraksa's Grimoire.

She finds Huffingwell an . . . interesting person, but has thoroughly friend-zoned him.

Ferenc Belinski (Blacksmith Thief) [-1 Gold]

Selena's older, ne'er-do-well brother. Was kicked out of the university after Professor Rockhard caught him cheating. Found a job in a steel mill, but was soon fired for drunkenness. Lived as a wastrel opium addict until his sister told him about Jon's secret laboratory--and all its alchemical concoctions. Seeking to make some money (and get high), he smashed down the hotel's backdoor with a sledgehammer . . . and was promptly knocked out cold by one of the possessed suits of armor. Selena begged for his life, and so Huffingwell put a (bullshit) curse on him, telling Ferenc that he must obey or his soul will be sucked into his grimoire.

He serves as a gofer, low-level muscle and an incompetent street contact. When he's sober enough, he sometimes helps run the hotel.

Once a month, Ferenc smokes a herb that astral projects him to the Dreaming Sky Realm. No one believes him when he returns.

Challenges

Knights (The Zapaport Bureau of Investigation, Paranormal Division) [+3 Gold]
The Reaper (The Call of the Skeleton King) [+12 Gold]

Jon Huffingwell's Story

Jon's mother was a machinist engineer, his father a writer of historical fiction. Though House Huffingwell had long since lost its noble lands, he still grew up among Frummberg's burgeoning burgher class and therefor had access to a proper education. From a young age he was fascinated by death and the afterlife and read every book he could find on the subject--though none delved into the minutia of techniques. It seemed unfair to Jon that necromancy was forbidden. How could someone outlaw knowledge?

Fortunately, Jon was born with a magical aptitude. One day, he told himself, I will learn this lost science.

He was sixteen when an outbreak of the Red Death killed a third of the city--his parents among them. Looters stole their belongings, robbed the banks. Penniless and homeless, Jon had no choice to but to leave the crippled city with thousands of other refugees. He rode the rails from town to town, but there was little work and fewer food.

It was by a rundown train station where Professor Hollow noticed Jon. The teenage boy was reading Metchnickov's A History of Thanatology. An amateurish tome, to be sure, but nevertheless a remarkable sight for even in this industrial age, literacy was rare and interest in dark arts rarer still.

The Professor took Jon under his wing and returned to his laboratory in the Aegborg Mountains. Apprentice to a real, live necromancer! At first it seemed a dream come true, but Jon soon found Professor Hollow too unscientific for his tastes. The man possessed little thirst for knowledge for its own sake, preoccupying himself instead with revenge on a nearby village. Some woman had apparently spurned his advances, so he therefore reanimated corpses and periodically sent them on midnight rampages.

But Jon stuck with him, because even a crazy teacher is better than none. And besides, his library included the Spiritele ie Bine, a grimoire on spectral techniques. Hollow was more interested in the flesh-twisting powers of his human-leather tome, using the Spiritele only when he needed soulcraft. But to Jon, souls were the bones of necromancy. He marveled at the rituals and metaphysical theories. And Nadya made nice company. It saddened him what had been done to her. He vowed he'd never be that sort of necromancer.

Jon also learned Hollow's Aegborg lair was built on the ruins of the Hunsley Family Estate--the childhood home of Marvis the Mad. Ordinarily, Jon would find this a mere historical curiosity, but Marvis' stepmother had been the Drakess Vipraksa.

Though by Marvis's time Vipraksa had long given up the practice, a millennium earlier the Shenlong dragon had been one of the greatest necromancers ever to have lived. Though records from that time are spotty, it's said she zombified tens of thousands and carved an empire across the devastated world that lasted most of the Hundred Year Winter.

Jon was more interested in her writings, however. Only snippets survived, but the subjects ranged from theories of sentience to ontology to meditations on eternity. Jon got goosebumps reading her. And to think this brilliant dragon necromancer had walked and flown across these lands--in fact, she'd even been slain here.

He searched the ruins--even the ancient Mernan ones--for artifacts belonging to Vipraksa, but treasure hunters had long ago scoured the area. He tried contacting her spirit through a Ouija board, but she never replied.

If only he had her grimoire . . . But he'd heard the tales and knew he wouldn't find it here. It would be up north. In Zapaport.

When the villagers came for Professor Hollow, Jon was not surprised. Hollow sent out his zombies guards, but the villagers had brought a retired paladin who was able to turn the undead. The villagers surrounded the house. Burning, kerosene-filled bottles crashed through the windows. Jon grabbed the Spiritele and a few bags of gold and exited through a secret tunnel. He left Hollow to his fate.

Jon took a train to Zapaport.

Once part of the Serjan Empire, Zapaport and it's surrounding countryside is now an independent republic. It's a city of the future and a city of the past. It's a city of steam and coal and gaslights, of temples and catacombs and mysterious cults as old as pan-humanity.

(City of Zapaport, Industrial District)

Now twenty-three, Jon made this his new home. He bought an dilapidated inn and renovated it. He wore a bearskin coat and a top hat. He carried a cane.

And he began his quest for the grimoire.

He'd heard the stories, of course. After Vipraksa's murder, her half-human daughter, Chandrakanta, fled with a golem servant to Zapaport where she enrolled in its university. During this time, she and a group of friends (and, if the reports are to be believed, a talking bear) went about solving mysteries and foiling villainous plots.

On one such occasion, someone had explored beneath the university and disturbed the tomb of Iskelet Kral (the "Skeleton King"), an evil vampire lich from the Norfyr Age. Cackling maniacally, the Skeleton King mass zombified all the dead in the city and set them to feast upon the living. Even to the present, this is known to Zapaporters as the "Night of the Living Dead."

Fortunately, Chandra and her gang used a combination of magic, melee and the power of friendship to defeat the Skeleton King and trap him in his tomb. To ensure it's never opened again, she sealed the stone door with her mother's grimoire.

That all happened three hundred years ago. Jon's not sure how much of this tale is true, but if the book's still there, he intends to retrieve it. So far he's managed to the secure aid of Selena and the ghost of Kasandra. Happily, his inn also used to be the home a family of serial killers, so there was plenty of angry spirits for him to make use of. He even has a couple of animated suits of armor.

Kasandra has convinced him to set up a Soul Cauldron in the cellar, but frankly Jon's too squeamish to use it. He doesn't want to take innocent lives just to boost his powers. Nadya certainly disapproves. Well, maybe if they sacrifice only bad people . . .

The Zapaport Bureau of Investigation is looking into reports of illegal necromancy, so in order to maintain a legitimate front, Jon has opened his inn as the "Huffingwell Hotel." Patrons avoid the place, however. They complain of nightmares and midnight howling.

Jon can sympathize with the nightmares. Images of blood and bones and a laughing skull haunt him when he sleeps. He knows this is the madness of the Skeleton King leaking through the wards to poison his mind. He knows he should follow Nadya's advice and leave the book be.

But the promise of knowledge beckons. Surely, there must be a way to retrieve the grimoire without disturbing the tomb?

Jon tries not to worry too much. He's sure he'll figure something out.

(The Huffingwell Hotel)

Next time: Back to Fallout.

JMHthe3rd · Jan 7, 2015

Back to Index

JUMPCHAIN CYOA

FALLOUT: PROJECT OSIRIS

Dr. Martin Polakowski
Chapter One

The armor is intact, but the shots banged loose some of the neural network's diodes. I solder them into place and realign the surrounding micro-Tesla coils. Mr. Virgil's mechanical claw reaches over my shoulder with a dual-triode vacuum tube--a good call, since the one by the ancillary processor looks a little fried.

I switch on the boot sequence and shut the access panel. The sentry-bot's red eyes flicker back to life. Its wheeled tripod feet twitch. Its weapon-mounted arms bend and twist as it runs a servo-systems test.

"Initialization complete. Processing self-diagnostics. Please stand by."

"The lasers are useless," Lieutenant Valerie Mauritius says. She's watching the combat robot with one of her sharp little frowns. Soot streaks her cheeks.

"Aren't you being a little harsh?" I say. "They burned their sails, didn't they?"

"And not much else." She waves a brown hand at the busy hospital tent across the courtyard. "Four of my men would be alive right now if we'd had a minigun instead of a Gatling laser."

I begin to protest, but I see the reigned emotion behind her dark eyes and don't want that unleashed on me. And she does have a point.

Beyond the sandbag defenses of the perimeter walkway, the morning sun glints harshly off the half-sunk hulks which cluttered the muddy water of the Willamette River. Smoke still clings to the muggy air.

The Wolves are getting smart. This time, they not only covered their longboats in mirrored metal sheets, but also wore them as body armor. The lasers still melted through, but it took longer. Too long. Some of their craft beached on the northern tip of Kiger Island, and a few even got close enough to toss grenades over the fort's brick walls. Fortunately Valerie wasn't hurt. I don't know what I'd do if something happened to her.

I try to think of something she'd like to hear. "I wish we had plasma guns," I say. When she doesn't smile or nod her head in agreement, I add quickly, "But maybe I can set the beam frequencies to oscillate. That should help negate heat reflection. It'll only take a min--"

"Just get us miniguns," she snaps. "Vindicators, if you can scrounge the ammo. And more robots too."

"But we don't have more robots! We're doing good keeping what we have working."

"Diagnostics complete. Combat subroutines loaded. Unit at 68% operational efficiency," the sentry-bot interrupts.

"Then get us what you can," Valerie says. "Things that work. This is a frontier military defense. Not a test site for your ray guns."

She scans the fort's crumbling brick walls, and for a moment looks lost and too young for her command. But she then shakes her head and steps down the rusted steel stairway to the ground. I watch her backside sway as she walks. Even under the dirty camouflage ceramic plates and woven polymer of her combat armor, she's gorgeous.

Some of the other guys don't think so. She isn't soft or curvy or well-stacked; she's petite iron graced with hard, thin muscles. Her face captures the angry beauty of a war elf. Other girls might be cute, but Valerie is a goddess.

If only she knew how I feel for her, how much I admire her for what she's accomplished.

One of Mr. Virgil's eye-stalks swivels to me, looks at her and twitches quizzically. His hover jet is a warm and gentle growl by my side.

"Confidence, dear boy," he says. "Just step right up and proclaim your intentions."

"But what if she says no?" I ask. "I don't think I could take that kind of rejection. Besides, after this she'll be a war hero of the Republic. Probably get a promotion. What would she see in a wormy little guy like me?"

"With an attitude like that, I imagine very little," Mr. Virgil says.

I shove my hands into my lab coat pockets and kick my feet. "Golly, I'd be happy if I could just be her friend."

It doesn't take long to finish the repairs. Mostly it's just system checks with a little part-swapping. Fort Kiger's six sentry-bots are sturdy machines, and I'm less worried about battlefield damage than plain old age.

When the bombs fell, our Vault came with a full warehouse of advanced robots and laser weapons. Two hundred years later, that original cache has dwindled to a few dozen units. Components wear out; cannibalization only delays the inevitable. I keep telling the Deans we need to focus on bootstrapping our industry, but they say that can wait until after the war's won.

I'm not sure it will be. Not by us, anyway.

On the way out I consider stopping to say goodbye, but through the command barracks window I see Valerie by her desk, talking into her Pip-Boy handset. She doesn't look happy, though no doubt it's just headquarters telling her what a swell job she did. She's not the type to bask in appreciation, though no one would say she lacks ambition. Far from it. She studied, passed the citizenship test and became the Republic's first Worldborn officer. And today, she not only won a great victory, but showed that her kind can be just as good as Vaultstock.

The southern gates creak protest as soldiers tug aside the rusted steel. I slip on my fedora, light up a cigarette and together me and Mr. Virgil exit the fort and head down the dirt road towards our waiting speedboat.

The island's little more than a sliver in the middle of the river, but the soil is fertile. Beyond chain-link fences, laborers in orange jumpsuits swing scythes and tie bundles of wheat. Guards with assault rifles patrol along perimeter platforms. The smell of tilled earth makes me think of the simple life.

Valerie's parents work on one of these farms. I've never met them before, but they must be very proud. Their daughter is a provisional citizen. Their grandchildren will be allowed to vote.

"The Mauritiuses, they're assigned to Harrisburg, right?"

"Indeed, sir," Mr. Virgil says as we allow a brahmin-pulled cart loaded with bushels to pass by. "Should we pay them a visit?"

"We could. I wonder what I should say, though. 'Congratulations on your daughter's victory'?"

"That would seem in order. And you do have influence. You could transfer them to less strenuous duties. Perhaps to the University?"

I lift my hat and scratch my thinning hair. "Domestic servants? It wouldn't be fair to them. They've worked in fields their whole lives. They wouldn't fit in with civilized folk."

"Valerie would appreciate it," Mr. Virgil says. "I don't think she gets to see them very often."

I'm about to reply when I hear her shout my name. I turn around to see Valerie jogging towards me. She looks angry and exhausted. She'd probably be red-faced if she wasn't so dark.

"Do you just ignore your PipBoy?" she demands.

I glance at my wrist. I almost always keep it muted. As Director of the Advanced Weapons Laboratory, I'm always getting engineering memos and requisition requests and other annoyances. Sure enough, the message light in the corner is flashing.

"It's from Villard Hall," she says. "I've been ordered to report in."

"Well, congratulations," I begin.

"You're coming too," she adds.

My cigarette droops between my lips. "Me? What did I do?"

Valerie's laugh is more a snicker, but still a rare sight.

"You're one of their top eggheads," she says. "You being at the capitol makes more sense than me."

"But the Deans won't be in session for another month!" I hate board meetings. But at least I get to take a boat ride time with Valerie . . .

"I believe this has something to do with the recent emissaries," Mr. Virgil says.

Both of us turn to the robot.

"I didn't inform you, Martin," he says, "because you don't like being bothered by this sort of thing, but I've been monitoring official communiques. It seems the NCR has sent a research team from Vault City. They arrived five hours ago."

"NCR," I grumble. They're a massive country not far to the south. A lot like the Old United States, and just as flawed. I've never been there, but I hear they have no citizenship tests, no genetic restrictions on entering government. Their leaders are elected by pandering to low-IQ mobs.

They make us Worldborn Rights activist look bad. At least we maintain standards.

"They probably just want to kill two birds with one stone," Valerie says bitterly. "Pin a medal on my chest, pat me on the rear and shove me back into the fight. Then you get to deal with whatever the Californians want."

"Oh, boy," I say deadpan. Even their scientists come across as bullies. They think they can lean on us just because their population's fifty times our size. Well, they may be bigger, but we're smarter.

Valerie and I walk the rest of the way in silence, which isn't too awkward. We've rarely ever talked. Mr. Virgil keeps jerking one of his eyes towards me expectantly, but I ignore him.

Corporal Adler and Private Best are waiting at the shore. Adler is a big, scarred man, past his prime but an experienced soldier of the First Viking War. Best is a mousy waif of a girl with wide urchin eyes and an mischievous overbite grin.

The speedboat's not some Pre-War rust-bucket, but Republic built. Sleek and shiny and whitewashed. I nestle into one of the leather seats. Mr. Virgil secure's himself into the robot docking station so he looks like a metal octopus toadstool growing from the aft deck.

Much to my delight, Valerie sits next to me. Her armored hip even touches my own. She tugs off her helmet and adjusts the loose bun of her black, kinky hair.

Adler raises a graying eyebrow but doesn't say anything. My crush on Valerie isn't as secret as I would like.

The microfusion motor makes a gentle thrum as we slice through the water. Spray and wind flaps our flag nicely on the bow, but they also blast me in the face. I toss my soaked cigarette overboard, wipe my glasses and just barely keep my fedora from blowing away. From her driver's seat, Best locks eyes with me through the rear-view mirror and smirks. I return the good humor with a sheepish grin.

I really should be more friendly with them. Not just because they're my assigned escorts, but because as a member of the Liberal Genetics Party, it's only right I mingle with those I fight for.

Both Adler and Best are Worldborn, Army-Class noncitizens. Middling intelligence, but real salt-of-the-earth types. Sixty years ago, their kind wouldn't have been allowed beyond the fences of their farms, no matter how high their IQs. We've made a lot of progress, but there are still those who fought tooth and nail against Valerie's promotion. I doubt this recent victory will change their minds.

If I'm more sympathetic than most Vaultstock, it's because I know that intelligence doesn't entail moral superiority. Even the most brilliant man can be a beast. But I suppose we all live in the shadow of our fathers' sins.

The boat trip drags on, and after marshaling my courage, I casually shift in my seat and "accidentally" lean into Valerie--just a bit. Our speed bounces us on the river, and as I watch her I find myself wishing she wasn't wearing her combat armor. Maybe a tank-top instead. With nothing underneath.

A year or so ago, when she was in the Academy, she used to go swimming all the time in a navy blue two-piece. My heart would hammer and my breath would quicken every time I watched her graceful, glistening movements, and I wanted nothing more than to hold her and caress her and kiss her all over her smooth dark body.

I never went swimming with her, of course--I'm too pasty and scrawny--but I sometimes sent Mr. Virgil by to take pictures of her with his eye-cameras. I have quite a collection in my room. Mr. Virgil says I'm a pervert, but it's better than nothing.

We're passing by the Harrisburg farms when I notice something awry. Along both riverbanks, a dozen or so Worldborn laborers crouch in the tall weeds. At first I think they're fishing--which is odd enough, since they're suppose to be behind their fence, working the fields--but instead of fishing poles they raise what look to be rifles.

Which is impossible. Laborers aren't allowed firearms.

Valerie shoves me from my seat and jumps on top of me. A muffled explosion rocks us, and I hear Adler grunt in pain. Gunfire crackle fill the air. The motor revs into a high whine, and everything tilts right.

"What's going on?" I ask, trying to peek over the boat's gunwale. A chunk of wood and aluminum explodes next to my cheek. Valerie smashes my head down to the deck. For such a petite woman, she's very strong.

"Keep down, you idiot!" she hisses into my ear. Through cracked glasses I see Best slumped against the steering wheel, half her brains gone through a fist-sized exit-wound. From the the passenger's seat Adler returns fire with his assault carbine while behind me Mr. Virgil blazes out red light with his laser arm. Bullets gouge into the robot's metal skin. More punch holes through the hull of our speedboat, which I can tell is veering wildly towards the eastern bank.

I don't know what else to do, so I shut my eyes and scream.

To be continued . . .

JMHthe3rd · Jan 10, 2015

Back to Index

SPACE OPERA REFUGEE ADVENTURE CYOA

Prince Jurian Malachi-Nguyen zu Hohenlohe-Cygnus
A.D. 2767

Training/Career

Cyber-tech Training (Free AI, Free Jammer, Free Hoverboard)
Medical Degree (+1 environmental suit, +1 medical cache, +250 Credits)

Starting Credits: 13,000 + 250 (Medical Degree) + 500 (Tax Lax) = 13,750

Starships: Battle-Strafer (Terminus Est, 2 light bays, 4 free turrets): Free (Tina Haywood)

Terminus Est

Length: 90 meters.

Weapons

1 LG Missile Launcher
2 Plasma Turrets
2 Laser Turrets
2 Cluster Rockets

Defenses

Flares
Shields
Mines
Repair Drones

Hanger

Copter
Groundracer

Somewhat obsolete, the Terminus Est is a heavily modified Lockheed-Yutani Y-14 Gunboat with far greater firepower and durability than one would expect from a ship its size. Its FTL drive can only make short jumps with long cool downs, however, so it's fairly slow.

Fighters
Copter (2 seats, 2 free turrets): -1,300 Credits

Weapons

Gatling laser
2 Cluster Rockets

Seats: 2

Old HC-6 "Buzzard" Hovercraft. Came with the Terminus Est.

Vehicles
Groundracer (5 seats, Antique): -750 Credits

Seats: 5

Ancient "Audi" automobile from the turn of the millennium. Owned by the Hohenlohe family for centuries. One of the few things Jurian managed to salvage. Heavily modified. Runs off microfusion cells. Jurian plans to fit it with antigravity.

Attire

Jumpsuit: Free
Environment Suit: Free (Medical Degree)
Finer Fashions: -500 Credits
Hard Light Shielding x2: -1500 Credits
Mix and Match (Hard Light with Finer Fashions): -100 Credits

Weapons

Sniper Rifle: -750 Credits
Custom Melee (Laser sword, adjustable length): -250 Credits
Grenades
- Frag: -150 Credits
- EMP: -150 Credits
- Stun: -150 Credits
Crossbow: -500 Credits
Classic Laser x3: -300 Credits
Chronos Relic Ring: -900 Credits
Custom Service Rifle (+ Tacticool adds): -500 Credits

Misc

Augmentation (Synthetic Eyes, Night Vision): -500 Credits
Holocom: -250 Credits
Artificial Intelligence: Free (Cyber-tech Training)
Hoverboard: Free (Cyber-tech Training)
Systems Jammer: Free (Cyber-tech Training)
Morph Mask: -450 Credits
Galactic Chart: -500 Credits
Medical Cache: Free (Medical Degree)
Turrets
- LG Rocket: Free (Battle-Strafer)
- Plasma x2: Free (Battle-Strafer)
- Laser x2: -300 Credits
- Gatling Laser: Free (Copter)
- Cluster Rocket x4: 2 Free (Copter, Battle Strafer) -500 Credits
EMP Panals: -550 Credits
Drone: -150 Credits
Entertainment System: -400 Credits
Escape Pods: -250 Credits
Ship Defenses
- Flares: -250 Credits
- Shields: -550 Credits
- Mines: -450 Credits
- Repair: -500 Credits
Laboratory (Medical): -600 Credits

Personal Equipment

Classic Laser Pistol
Finer Fashions/Hard Light Shielding (Mix and Match)

Citizenship: Kimaruthus
Perks

Yeah, Boss
A-List
Tax Lax (+500 Credits)
Made in Kriegenfist (Double Turret Power)

Remaining Credits: 0

Companions

Tina Haywood

Whiny goth. Excellent pilot. Former PMC helmsmen for the Imperial Japanese Navy. Went AWOL during the Kepler-16 Nova. Used the subsequent chaos to steal the Terminus Est. Has issues with authority. Passive-aggressive. Injured by a terrorist bombing. Met Jurian while recovering in a hospital. She's best friends with now, despite their frequent political arguments.

Equipment: Classic Laser Pistol

Team Role: Pilot of Terminus Est. Can also fly the helicopter.

(Free Battle-Strafer)

Fun-Bot

Backstory: An old mall security bot found wandering the corridors of Brunt-Maxis. Brought in by Tina and (sort of) reprogrammed by Jurian. Simple brain. Not really sentient.

Very durable. Armed with twin laser cannons.

Team Role: Muscle. Jurian's bodyguard.

Esperanza Castro "La Chica Sombra"

Former Special Agent for the Sagittarius Union. Good at gunplay and martial arts, but a master at stealth and espionage. After being reprimanded many times for insubordination, she quit and went freelance. Overconfident. Sassy. Easily angered. Greedy and amoral.

Hired by a shadow cabal within the Galactic Reich to travel to the planet Kimaruthus, break into a cryonics lab under a casino and steal Adolf Hitler's frozen head. She accepted the job mainly for the challenge. And the thrill.

After killing some pursuing Commonwealth agents, she convinced Jurian to help her in her quest. She thinks he's an upper class twit, but he's a useful upper class twit.

Equipment:

Chronos Relic Ring
Stealth Field
Hard Light Shielding
Laser Sword
Classic Laser Pistol
Crossbow
Grenades
- Frag
- EMP
- Stun
Sniper Rifle
Assault Rifle

Team Role: She's the woman with the plan. Versatile. Good with combat. Can't really be trusted, however.

Professor Vyyan Ru

Exiled alien scientist. Cyborg. Brilliant, but somewhat amoral. Hired by Castro for his expertise on matter teleportation. He needs the money to buy materials for his illegal black hole WMDs.

Team Role: Brains. He'll use a blink teleporter to displace Castro into the casino's cyronic lab.

(Free Blink generator for Battle-Strafer)

"Blinks" Ujo Sjel

Expert with computers. Was programmer-architect for the Atta Me'kaka Casino's security systems before crime boss K-Bass Kamanda killed her brother for failing to pay his gambling debts. Soon afterwards, Ujo lost her Work Visa and was deported from Kimaruthus.

She's joined Castro's heist mostly for revenge, though the money would be nice too.

Team Role: Insider info. She knows how to work around the casino's defenses. Also, she knows the hidden routes to get into the cryonics lab.

Prince Jurian's Story

The nova may have destroyed Jurian's homeworld, but troubles for his family began years before he was born, when the Hohenlohens found themselves on the wrong side of a coup. The Reich stripped the ancient house of its properties and exiled its members from their ancestral space. Later, when granted a pardon if he would renounce his allegiance to the deposed Kaiserstarne, Jurian's father refused. The Reich had turned from human separatists to expansionist butchers, he said. He would take no part in their madness.

But even reduced, the Hohenlohens owned many assets, so Jurian and his siblings and cousins grew up on a wealthy estate on an out of the way planet in the dual-star system of Kepler-16. As was customary for a Prince of the Reich, he studied for a career, taking a particular interested in cybernetic medicine. He heard news of a new war brewing between the Reich and the Commonwealth Imperium, but this concerned him little. Though of a proud bloodline, he would never take part in these greater things. A long, quite life laid before him.

Red dwarfs are not supposed to go nova, but evidently no one told this to Kepler-16B. Jurian was in the system's Kupier Belt, practicing piloting with his older brother, Wilmot, when they saw the space-searing flash. A dozen planets. Hundreds of moons. Billions of lives. Gone.

Jurian and Wilmot were the last of the Hohenlohens.

Some believe the nova was no accident, but how could one destroy a star? Nothing was ever proven.

Scrounging what they could from a family-owned ice planetoid, the brothers left the ruins of Kepler-16 for the Brunt-Maxis City-Station. Three days after they arrived, there was a terrorist bombing in a hanger bay. Hundreds were killed, including Wilmot. Jurian himself was left blinded.

Alone and destitute in a refugee hospital, Jurian soon found a curious kinship with Tina Haywood, who had also been wounded in the attack. Her sarcastic nihilism paradoxically cheered him up, or at least distracted him from his own misery and desolation. Weeks passed. Tina helped him get around, keeping him from stumbling too much.

Eventually, the Bank of Sol wired him a small inheritance--the last remnant of the Hohenlohen's great wealth. He bought himself new eyes, choosing the color purple to represent his royal lineage. The burn marks on his face he kept to remind him of what he'd lost.

Jurian and Tina followed the war over the news. The Reich had apparently got itself a three front war against the Commonwealth, the American Empire and the Second Soviets. The Reich was not winning. Tina told him it didn't matter. He'd never even been to Kriegenfist, and he probably never would. Besides, the Reich had tossed his family out. Fuck 'em.

Despite their differences, they became best friends. Though it remained platonic (Jurian was sixteen, Tina twenty-five), they still planned a future together. With his remaining funds and her starship, maybe they could make money. Laziness set in, however. Months passed. They spent much of their time lounging around the Terminus Est's bay, playing VR games or goth-metal music.

It all changed when Esperanza Castro appeared. Jurian first witnessed her as a translucent ghostly figure cutting down a Commonwealth death squad with her laser sword. The next day she and her two xeno companions came to see him. She said she needed his help.

Not everyone in the Reich was happy with Fuehreress Helga's reign. There were some that looked to the past for their leadership.

After his death, the ancient Earth-Reich hero Adolf Hitler had his head secretly removed and cryonically preserved in liquid nitrogen. For eight hundred years it's been thought lost, but recently Reich spies had discovered it to be is in the possession of K-Bass Kamanda, a Kimaruthus casino owner and member of the "Bass Brothers" crime syndicate.

Esperanza has been contracted to break into his lab under the casino and retrieve the head. Then the Reich's secret cabal will overthrow Helga and place the freshly resurrected Hitler as the new Fuehrer.

However, with the recent Kepler-16 Nova and the chaos of the war, Esperanza and her team were currently trapped on Brunt-Maxis--and more Commonwealth agents were on her trail. She needed a ride.

For the first time in his life, Jurian feels a sense of purpose. He wasn't the most attentive student, but he remembers reading of "Adolf the Great" in his Reich textbooks. He's seen the ancient painting of Hitler in gleaming white plate mail, holding the sacred flag as he prepares to lead his knights against the wicked King Churchill.

Every child in the Reich knows he was a brilliant strategist and friend to all humankind. In anyone can win the galactic war and bring peace to the galaxy, it's Adolf Hitler.

So with dreams of saving the Reich, he and his companions leave Brunt-Maxis for the planetary metropolis of Kimaruthus. He's not exactly thrilled to be traveling with xenos (though he finds Ujo strangely cute), but he has little problem with them--so long as they know their place.

Overall though, he's excited for the adventure ahead. How many people get to resurrect a legendary hero? How many get to save the Fatherspace?

The Savior of the Galactic Reich?

JMHthe3rd · Jan 23, 2015

Back to Index

JUMPCHAIN

FALLOUT: PROJECT OSIRIS

---
Rule Sheet
Character Sheet
Chapter One
---
Dr. Martin Polakowski
Chapter Two

Corporal Adler's carbine rips a staccato rat-a-tat-tat. Mr. Virgil's laser is a hissing sear. Enemy bullets pound into the speedboat's hide while Private Best's corpse on the wheel keeps us turning a right so hard that I fear we'll capsize. Another explosion spits a geyser which soaks us all.

Still screaming, I try to crane my head to see our attackers, but Valerie presses me down. She can't weigh more than a hundred ten, twenty pounds, tops, but her armor adds a bit. And I'm no supermutant. She shouts curses as I struggle. I've lost my fedora, I think stupidly as I watch water gush through little round holes in the aluminum hull. I wiggle until I can see Mr. Virgil, mounted on the aft deck.

He wasn't made for combat, and it shows. One of his eye-stalks dangles limply. Smoke fumes from his undercarriage. He's my best friend. He practically raised me. I have to do something. I scrabble in my pockets for my gun.

The boat bounds across something solid, and we're airborne.

The crash flings us into a world of slime and weeds. I slam on my back, my brain seeming to bounce into the sky. Gunfire pops sharply from somewhere far away.

My minds idles and stutters, but then I roll over and see my laser pistol sticking barrel first in the wet earth. I have just enough time to snatch it up before Valerie grabs the scruff of my coat and drags me sliding back to the speedboat, which is now on its side like a giant, partly-sunken clam-shell wall.

I'm lying down, too discombobulated to act. Beside me Best is sprawled in a pose grotesquely seductive. Adler is leaning against the now-sideways driver's seat, his right arm bent in ways it shouldn't. Mud streaks his confused face. Valerie crouches with her sidearm in a double grip.

Fire from the far bank continues to plink through the hull, but at least they can't see us. Those on our side of the river, however, I can hear shouting as they close in.

By the boat's bow a ragged man with a hunting rifle rises from the tall grass and charges. Valerie fires a half dozen shots, and he falls. Two more take his place. She empties the clip into them both. The one still standing staggers, but raises a lever-action rifle.

Oh, right. I have a laser.

I've always found energy weapons easy to shoot. No recoil, and even if you miss, you just wobbled the beam until you hit what you want. Coherent, blazing red light sets the man's burlap clothes aflame. He drops his gun and flails back screaming, but as his tunic smolders and curls black, I see the shiny metal breastplate beneath, warping with heat. I focus on his head instead, which after a half-second bursts with crimson steam.

I freeze as the headless body goes down. I've never killed a man before. The smell is sickening.

Valerie lunges forward, grabs Adler's carbine and sprays suppressive fire at any upcoming shooters before retreating back behind the boat's bow. Keeping low in the mud, I crawl over Best's body to get to Valerie. Adler's between us. He seems half-asleep. One of his pupils is more dilated than the other. I tug him down so he's lying prone. The cushioned seat where he'd just been leaning pops yellow stuffing as a bullet passes.

"Call for help!" I cry over the gunshots.

But she's already shouting into her PipBoy's mic. She waits, and then repeats her message. But over the tiny speaker comes only eerily howling white noise. She tries the boat's radio. Same thing.

"They're jamming us," I say in disbelief. From the metal armor I know these must be Wolves. And Wolves are savages. Savages shouldn't be able to do this.

Valerie reloads and looks about skittishly, the whites of her eyes wide and bright in her dark face. There may be a dozen or more of them out there, and she's already fought one battle today. She's about cashed out.

I gaze into the mud and think. The one with what was probably grenades must on the river's far bank because otherwise we'd be dead. But the enemy on our side have got us pinned down. They don't have us surrounded yet--all the shots have come from the north--but they know their window's closing. Soon they'll have to flank us and start lobbing explosives.

On the other hand, Harrisburg's river patrol can't be more than a few miles away. They just need to know we're here.

As always with me, the answer comes like a bolt in darkness.

I pull pliers from my lab coat and crawl back over Best to the stern. The boat's radio antenna is snapped in half, but it'll have to do. After I unscrew it, I open the engine compartment and disconnect the H-cell microfusion battery. Big as a ham-set and as heavy as an anvil, it nearly snaps my wrist as it plops from its housing into the mud. I'm already turning around to ask Mr. Virgil for his internal oscillator when I realize he's not here.

My gut sinks. Where's Mr. Virgil?

I've lost my glasses, but I can still spot the ball of scrap up the slope of the bank, by a barbwire fence. The crash must have flung him from his docking port. I force myself not to panic. His neural network's pretty deep in his chassis. As long as it's intact, he's alive.

Valerie leans out as she unleashes a burst. A return volley splashes tiny craters in the mud by her feet. She winces as something deflects off her green ceramic plates. "What are you doing?" she snaps.

"Counter-counter measures. It's called signal agility. We boost our transmitting power and switch frequencies until we find a weak spot in their jamming spectrum. We won't be able to receive, but we may be able to broadcast." I scamper beside Valerie, tug wires loose from the boat's set and add, "I need to go get a part from Virgil. I need you to cover me."

She regards me with blank perplexity, as if seeing me for the first time, and then steals another glance out beyond the bow. "No, I'll go," she says finally. "Tell me what you need."

I'm about to argue, but practicality trumps chivalry. She's wearing the combat armor, after all.

I pass her my priers and I quickly tell her how to open Mr. Virgil's dorsal maintenance panel and remove his oscillator. While she listens, she takes road flares from a supply chest and tosses them around the boat. The tall grass is wet, but the bright magnesium torches soon throw up a thin veil of gossamer smoke. I watch one of the men she shot earlier thrash and moan weakly as small spreading flames envelope him.

Gripping Best under the arms, Valerie awkwardly drags the body over the now-unconscious Adler and props it by the bow, resting the neck against the nub of the snapped flagpole. She motions me over.

"Keep behind her. You don't have to hit anything. Just keep them down. I'll be right back."

I crouch almost in the lap of the corpse, superstitiously fearful of its dead eyes. With no preamble, Valerie sprints through smoldering grass and up the bank. The gunfire gets excited. I timidly lean from cover and shoot my laser in their direction. Smoke and my nearsightedness imbues randomness to my aim.

I spare a peek at Valerie, afraid I'll see her head pop like Best's. By the fence, she ducks behind Mr. Virgil's shattered form.

I continue firing. The red light decoheres through the smoke, but I have the satisfaction of seeing a blurry figure run as the fogged beam passes over his head. Valerie may be right about the pitfalls of lasers, but despite their shortcomings, they make excellent terror weapons.

The burning foliage stings my throat, so I hunch down and keep my head low, not even looking as I hold out my arm and pull the trigger. Best's slumped torso sashays as bullets slam into her back armor. Fear is a funny thing. I've been afraid since the ambush began, but only now do I realize we might not get out of this. We could die on this muddy shore and Valerie would never know how I feel about her.

But I have little time to reflect on this. I'm slapping a fresh charge into my pistol when Valerie races back down the slope. She grabs her thigh and nearly slips, but makes it to the boat and hands me the small gray box, dimpled on the side with vacuum tube diodes.

I waste no time. I plug the oscillator into the side of my PipBoy and use the wires from the radio to attach it to the battery and the broken antenna. Valerie doesn't even question what I'm doing. She may have a near-genius IQ, but she's no engineer. She lays down fire with my laser.

A simple signal has a better chance to break through, so instead of speaking, I use Morse: S-O-S-A-M-B-U-S-H-N-H-B-U-R-G.

Perhaps two minutes go by as I tap out the message again and again, my world receding to a finger on a button. Then Valerie knocks me down and shouts, "Molotov!"

Glass breaks. There's a whoosh. By the bow the smoking grass erupts into an inferno which even across several feet nips through my damp lab coat. Valerie grabs my scruff and drags me behind the stern, tearing my PipBoy loose from its connections. She runs back and drags Adler to safety before standing upright with her laser at the ready. I huddle behind her and peek over her shoulder at the wall of flames that's already consuming Best's body. The humid air reeks of burning wood alcohol and flesh.

Valerie shoots a couple of blasts down the keel-side of the boat. Enemy bullets ricochet off the boat's twin propeller blades, which spin from the impacts. Any second, a second firebomb will crash at our feet. I hug Valerie from behind, and in her ear whisper, "I love you."

She stiffens. A buzz-saw rips the air. This is it, I think. But the screeching continues, and yet we're still in one piece. Then we see the patrol boat pass us by.

The soldier manning its bow-mounted Minigun swivels slowly as he strafes the bank. Along the gunwale, a half dozen others fire assault rifles. Across the water there's another, more blurry boat engaging the Wolves on the other side. Over the crackle comes screams of the dying.

It's over quickly. We're safe. Inches from my face, the back bun of Valerie's hair carries an intoxicating musk over the nightmare smells of battle. I laugh giddily and bury my nose into the kinky blackness.

"Uh, Dr. Polakowski," says Valerie slowly.

"Oh, Sorry." Reluctantly, I withdraw my arms from the cold, mud-streaked contours of her combat armor and step away.

---

Mr. Virgil looks like a smashed mechanical cephalopod, but it's not as bad as it could be. His voice modulator is shot, but his remaining eye-stalk twitches as he watches me kneel beside him. I pat his bent hull reassuringly before stepping back down the bank. The Republic has a large cache of Mr. Handy parts. I'll fix him up in no time.

The medic has already bound Adler's arm and shot him with a stimpak. I watch as his stretcher is carried onto the deck of the patrol boat. A prisoner--the lone survivor among the enemy--is dragged aboard behind him. He was screaming about 'freedom' and 'death to slavers' before the soldiers had the good sense to gag him.

I myself saw the tattooed barcode on his forearm. He's not a Wolf. He's one of our laborers. All of them were.

Well, that's ingratitude for you. Here I am, fighting to give them more rights, and they go and pull a stupid stunt like this. But I guess I can't be too angry with them. Having inferior intellects, they're more easily led astray by foreign propaganda.

I ask a private for a cigarette, and as he lights me up I wonder who put the workers up to it. Their metal armor suggests Wolves, but I wouldn't be surprised if the NCR was behind it. That'd just be like them, sow discontent before an invasion. Either way, the prisoner will tell us. Our interrogators are top-notch. They'll have ways of making him talk.

It takes a while for the patrol to prepare. Mr. Virgil's no lightweight, so four of them have to carry him pallbearer-style. Another soldier snaps photographs of the carnage, even taking one of me beside the wrecked speedboat. I pose with as much dignity as I can muster, though my white lab coat looks as if it'd been soaked in brahmin dung.

I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. Valerie hands me my laser

"Thanks," I mutter, slipping it into my coat.

She gives me a tired smile. A bandage is wrapped around her knee, but thanks to her armor it's little more than a nasty bruise.

"You did good," she says. "We'd be dead if you hadn't thought of that radio trick."

I try to shrug nonchalantly. "Ah, golly, it was nothing. I didn't even know it was going to work. But I had to try something and, uh . . ." Puffing my smoke, I grin nervously and rub my wet hair, trying not to be too self-conscious over how bald I must look. "Look, about what I said . . ."

She holds up a thin, long-fingered hand "It's cool. I know you have a crush on me. You haven't exactly been subtle about it. But you're really, really not my type. So . . . consider yourself friend-zoned."

I can't say I'm exactly surprised. All her boyfriends have been big tall black guys.

"So, you're saying we can be friends?"

She blinks. "Sure."

"I can settle for that," I say cheerfully. And in the meantime I can work my subtle charm: follow her everywhere, do everything she tells me, and just be an all around nice guy. That's sure to win her over.

And complimenting her couldn't hurt.

"Anyway," I go on, "I may have helped out, but you're the real hero. And twice in one day! I know it seems like bad luck, but by gum, you sure came through!"

She frowns. "I don't think luck has anything to do with it. They didn't set up an ambush with jammers just to shoot up a random boat. You were on board. And without you, half the Republic's ray guns and robots would break down."

I look at the wreckage and charred grass and the dead bodies strewn down the bank. I'd assumed the Wolves were attacking because that's what Wolves do, and I was just in the wrong place in the wrong time. I think of Best. That bullet that emptied her brains was meant for me.

"Oh," I say.

She kneels and picks my glasses out of the mud. She uses her thumb to wipe the cracked lenses before passing them to me and saying, "Yeah, 'Oh.' But hey, they tried to kill you and failed. If I were you, I'd call that a good day."

The boat ride to Eugene is long but thankfully uneventful.

To be continued . . .
---
Next up, I'm going to introduce the Star Wars: The Clone Wars character of the Jumpchain.

JMHthe3rd · Jan 26, 2015

Back to Index

JUMPCHAIN

STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS
Rule Sheet

The Proxy War

These are tense times for the Chiss Ascendancy. Both the savage Ssi-ruuvi Imperium and the nomadic Vaagari Empire are pressing at the borders, and there are rumors of a much greater threat from beyond the galaxy. The Chiss' Expansionary Defense Force, however, is politically barred from preemptive strikes. They can do little else but prepare for the coming conflict.

But there are other ways to fight a war.

Chiss Space has many primitive neighbors, and by offering them advanced technology, they can be used to resist the Ascendancy's enemies. Though they will certainly be annihilated, they will slow the invaders down. They will buy the Ascendancy time.

The Samsarans are one such species. Having only recently developed the hyperdrive, they're no match for the Vaagari hordes which will soon rampage through their space. The CEDF has dispatched a Picket Force to offer technical assistance and training.

However, the Samsarans are a divided people, locked in a cold war over both religion and ideology. They may destroy themselves before the Vaagari even arrive.

And enemies of the Chiss are always watching, always plotting . . .

Lieutenant Ar'zava'niva

Starting Points: 1000

Starting Location: (Roll 1d8: 8, Free Choice) Planet Samsara (Early Space Age Civilization, in the Unknown Regions along the Vaagari Corridor)

Age and Gender

Age: (1d8+16, Roll: 2) 18
Gender: Female

Origin: Engineer [-50 Points]

Allegiance: Independent (Chiss Ascendancy)

Species: Chiss

Skills, Abilities and Perks

Basic Mechanics [Free, Engineer]
Piloting [-100 Points]
Melee Training [-200 Points]
Ranged Training [-100, Discount for Engineer]

Marketplace

Datapad [Free, Engineer]
Blaster Pistol (Charric) [-50 Points]
Utility Belt [-50 Points]
Battle Armor [-150 Points]
CloakShape Fighter [-150 Points, Discount for Engineer]
R2 Series Astromech Droid [-150 Points]

Complications: None

Remaining Points: 0

Images

Appearance: Tall and athletic. Nose and cheeks dusted with freckles. Hair prematurely graying. Hard eyes. Has a pretty face that rarely smiles.

Personality: Bitter and friendless. Keeps to herself. Ashamed of her disgrace and the embarrassment she's caused her family. Buries herself in work. Misses her ex-girlfriend. Cries when alone. The CEDF forces her to take a libido-inhibiting drug which contributes to her depression.

Background: After finishing primary school with honors, Ar'zavan enrolled in Csilla's Military Academy where she excelled at both astro-navigation and mechanical engineering. With her skills and family connections, she knew she could fulfill her dream of being a starfighter pilot.

She graduated fourth in her class, and at age thirteen [*] was commissioned as a Lieutenant and assigned aboard the carrier Winterhawk. Her future looked bright.

Perhaps it would have remained so, if it weren't for Chaf'ana'sasho.

They met while in the Academy. Though Fanasa was studying to be a medical officer and therefore moved in different circles, Ar'zavan found in her a kindred spirit. The two girls had many of the same interests--sports, music, martial arts . . . but it was more than that. They shared a bond, an ineffable understanding that made their friendship inseparable.

And soon they became more than friends.

It was a forbidden, whirlwind romance, but they knew it couldn't last. Upon graduation their careers took them down different paths, so they said their goodbyes and promised they would keep in touch, meeting up from time to time.

A few years later, after one of their secret rendezvous, House Nuruodo received an anonymous data package. It revealed everything. Ar'zavan found herself under arrest and charged with sexual deviancy.

She never found out who planted the hidden camera in Fanasa's quarters, but she knew she should have anticipated this: as one of the Ruling Families, the Chafs were powerful, and the powerful have enemies.

But, being powerful, they could also avoid the full brunt of consequences. Fanasa was dishonorably discharged and forced to undergo counseling.

Ar'zavan's family, however, did not carry the same political weight, and so she was offered no such leniency but instead faced a lengthy sentence and an invasive psycho-surgery 'cure.' But her high marks and the influence of her aunt, Admiral Ar'alani, allowed an alternative: behavioral modification via a libido-inhibitor.

Ar'zavan accepted, though it did little to save her career. Deemed no longer fit as an active starfighter pilot, she was reclassified as an Equipment Engineer Officer and reassigned to Picket Force Six, a small frontier fleet tasked with upgrading the militaries of "buffer zone" civilizations.

Ar'zavan has spent the last year and a half teaching furry primitives how to fly obsolete fighters to prepare for a war they can't win. Aside from times when she's flying her CloakShape, it's unfulfilling work, but she does her duty well because she has nothing else. Her peers shun her, she's forbidden contact with Fanasa, and though nominally supportive, her family has made it clear they find her an embarrassment.

The pills help, if only because they dull her soul.

But while it seems fate has made a wreck of her life, a war is coming, and as Ar'zavan will soon find out, the dice of war can roll the strangest of fortunes.

---

*-Chiss experience an accelerated growth rate compared to humans, biologically maturing by age ten.

Next up, I'm going to write up a Star Dust entry. This should be fun.

JMHthe3rd · Feb 5, 2015

Back to Index

STAR DUST
Sweet Home
Rule Sheet

Michael Han

Prologue: Something Wonderful

Bastion System, Outer Kuiper Belt
Federal Stardate: 727.63

Michael is asleep. Michael is aware. Michael is the Shenmi Shui.

Cold vacuum caresses the hull, warmed only by the faint kiss of Bastion Star fifty AU away. For millions of kilometers in every direction, his scanners touch nothing, not a pebble, not shard of ice. The small vessel is alone--save for the Baby Bird five hundred meters off the bow.

Part of his mind frets over mana-indeterminacy and Planck-spin alignments, but also he watches the white space-suited figures of Alena and Sarah float and thruster around the custom built drone. The Baby Bird looks amateurish, like a giant trashcan with scrap glued to its waist. In less than a hour it will--hopefully--do what no other human-built warp drive has done before.

"You've been quiet," Anna says. She sits in the dimly lit half-shell of Shenmi's cockpit, reviewing gravimetrics which flash as green text across her contacts. Michael sees her through a half-dozen cameras mounted around the small cabin. He also sees himself.

In the seat beside her, his body lays fastened in the Linksuit, his brown eyes open yet sightless behind the curved faceplate of his perfluorocarbon-flooded helmet. No matter how many times he's done this, he finds it hard to remember he's still in there--still a brain and not a ghost in the ship's systems.

Anna hesitates, chews the inside of her lip like she always does when worried. Michael thinks it looks cute on her.

"Are you okay?" she asks. "Are things getting weird? It's been over eight hours. If you want, we can take a break."

"I'm fine," he says through the com in her ear. "Just a little . . ."

"Anxious?"

"Lonely."

With an impish grin, she runs a finger down the ribbed red plastic of his suit's chest before looking into the camera over the control panel.

"Maybe we can do something about that tonight," she says. "You know, to celebrate revolutionizing space exploration."

If the experiment's a success. But he doesn't say that. Instead, he chuckles and says, "You may have to do most of the work. All linking and no sleep makes Mike a tired boy."

She laughs. "I bet I can keep you awake."

"A fool's bet," he replies, but honestly he wouldn't mind a few extra hours in the suit--even this one. He would never tell her, of course, but at its best linking was better than sex. Once your brain's been jacked into a starship's neural network and your consciousness explodes into an electric euphoria zapping across a silver universe of machine dreams . . . a few happy muscle spasms and a spurt of fluids just didn't compare.

Which might be true now if he were linked to one of Beatrice R&D's state of the art research vessels--like he was during his training. The Shenmi Shui, however, is smaller than some shuttles and was obsolete before he was born. Being linked to her, while somewhat relaxing, made him also feel dull, dingy and faintly claustrophobic. But as recent graduates with student loan payments dangling over their heads, she's all they could afford to rent.

Not that they're taking her for a joyride. This voyage is the culmination of over two years of late night calculations and reverse-engineered mana-tech calibrations. Today, the Baby Bird will either fly or fall.

The principle is sound enough. Faster-than-light travel is unnatural. It only works because somebody--either the Heralds or a race before them--engaged in some serious galactic-scale engineering and constructed the Star Hub, a network of wormholes that act as a superhighway system in ten dimensional space. So-called "warp drives," if activated far enough from a gravity well, access these routes.

For centuries, this was how humanity spread across hundreds of star systems. But they did so without understanding. And they never found the way home.

But from what little could be interpreted from their ancient databases, it's obvious the Heralds reached tens of thousands of star systems that humanity cannot. Had the Hub degraded with the aeons, leaving certain routes inaccessible? Perhaps--it could be older than the universe for all anyone knew--but perhaps instead humanity has been using not the highway, but rather the service roads.

Not a new idea, but Michael and Anna haven't spent seven years at Beatrice Tech to come up with art major hypotheses. They studied Planck-scale spacetime geometries and Heraldic mana technology and came up with the design of mana matrices, a sort of "cosmic steering wheel" for the Hub.

Who knows whether it will work, but if a success, they'll be the greatest scientific couple since Pierre and Marie. No more scrimping to make the rent. No more puttering about in shit-can starships . . .

Eager to begin, Michael watches and waits. Alena and Sarah don't really need to be out there fiddling with the Baby Bird, but a last-minute systems check couldn't hurt. And they know what they're doing. Both are friends of Anna and brilliant in their own ways.

Alena Bach was a child prodigy, inventing the Bose-Einstein cooling unit when she was nine. Now twenty, one couldn't ask for a better engineering graduate to harmonize so many hodgepodge systems.

Sarah Escher is the stranger of the two. In her freshman year she became religiously obsessed with mana energy, deliberately basking in its radiance until she had to be hospitalized. Even now, her eyes glow and she must undergo monthly nano-therapy to keep the cancers at bay. But she has the technical expertise to back up her craziness, having earned a Doctorate in Mana-Photon Physics when she was only twenty-five.

Part of Michael wishes he was out there with them. It's been a while since he space-walked.

Examining the drone to their satisfaction, Alena and Sarah return to the Shenmi.

"Baby looks ready to roll," Alena says as they stroll through the cycled airlock, their heads bent against the low ceiling and their steps bouncy in the artificial quarter-gravity.

Sarah unfastens and tugs away her helmet. The green phosphorescent glow of her irises cast ghostly light on the cabin walls.

"Something wonderful is about to happen," she says in her typically eerie monotone.

"Glad for the vote of confidence," Anna says. "Get to your stations. The sooner we make history, the sooner Mike gets nap time." She pats Michael's helmet.

"Don't make me cranky," he playfully growls through everyone's ear-com. "You wouldn't like me when I'm cranky."

While they strap themselves in, he maneuvers the ship away from the Baby and monitors the drone's warp drive diagnostic.

"Mana Matrix One is green. Mana Matrix Two is green," he says approvingly. He stops when the Shenmi Shui is two hundred kilometers from the Baby Bird--a safe distance in case things go catastrophic. Now there's nothing else to do except to do it.

"Anna, you want to say something memorable?" he asks.

"Not really."

"'Not really'? Is that memorable?"

Alena snorts. "Come on, let's get this show on the road."

"Something wonderful . . . " Sarah mutters to herself as she rocks in her seat.

"Good enough," Michael says and activates the Baby Bird's drive.

It happens very fast.

In the first tenth of a second, a warp bubble envelops the drone in a glistening pearl of white exotic-energy. Like it's supposed to. Next, the bubble expands, slowly, like a balloon on a helium nozzle. No cause for alarm. Well within expected parameters. Soon the bubble will pop and the Baby will disappear into ten dimensional space.

But instead the bubble turns black and explodes outward in a sphere of annihilation. At T-plus three-tenths of a second, the warp bubble's diameter is one hundred eighty kilometers and growing.

Nootropic drugs, genetic engineering and years of training allow Michael to react faster than any unaugmented human, but even as he fires the Shenmi's ventral thrusters and prepares the main drive for ignition, he knows it's futile. Darkness overtakes them.

Nothing dramatic. No wild shaking. No sparks spraying from instrument panels. But for the space of a few heartbeats, the Shenmi floats in starless void.

Sarah gazes about in silent rapture. Alena asks casually, "So, are we dead?"

And the stars reappear. But they're wrong.

"Apparently not," Anna says, head craned back as fresh starcharts stream across her eyes.

But Michael can process astronavigational data quicker. Not that he needs to. A cursory scan tells him they're on the outskirts of a system with a yellow G-type main sequence star. And four gas giants, one with very large rings . . .

If his body wasn't anesthetized, he would feel butterflies in his stomach. Instead, his consciousness grows giddy at the edges. It can't be. It's ridiculous. What are the chances?

Though part of his mind never stopped monitoring the Baby, he spares a slice of a second to reassure himself. It's undamaged and Mana Matrix Two is still online. Good. That's their only ride home. He turns his attention to the third planet from the star.

"Holy shit . . ." Anna says. She knows too. But he has to see it. He has to be sure.

It takes nearly a minute for the Shenmi's telescope to find and focus across sixty AU, and in that time Michael hears Alena ask, "What is it, Anna? What do you see?" and Sarah giggle and cry, "Something wonderful! Didn't I tell you? Something wonderful!"

But he scarcely notices, for in his visual manifold his sight zooms dreamlike through the black depths of space like a tachyonic arrow until the planet grows before him in all its graveyard splendor: icy continents and brown oceans, a shattered moon and a derelict battlestation a thousand kilometers across.

He projects the image through the cockpit's holo-screen, and for the first time in nearly eight hundred years, human eyes see Earth.

"Shit, that's her, isn't it?" says Alena. Then, "She looks dead."

"All the lunar debris," Anna says. "I doubt even bacteria survived."

"The mana . . . the mana wants us to be here!" Sarah exclaims.

Even before they went to school and learned history, they all heard the tales of the apocalyptic Battle of Diana's Hammer and the mad Last Flight of the USS Pyrrhic. And of course, the heartbreaking Exodus led by Admiral Chang. Sixteen billion died, but Humanity won a war here. And lost a home.

But now humanity has found its way back. And that humongous battlestation . . . long dead and full of Heraldic loot!

Michael wishes his body were awake. Desperately, he wants someone to drain the breathable liquid from his suit so he can get up and dance and laugh and hug and kiss Anna.

"Oh my god!" he cries through everyone's com. "We're going to be rich and famous!"

---

Faction: Independent (Beatrice Tech)
Quest: Sweet Home . . .

Anna Tse is Free
6m off Beatrice R&D and Pulsar Inc. hull base prices

Skills (12 skill points)

Basic Piloting
Standard Piloting (+5% ship acceleration)
Advanced Piloting (+5% ship acceleration)
Basic Mechanics
Advanced Mechanics (Michael counts as a mechanical engineer)
Basic Nuclear
Advanced Nuclear (Michael counts as a nuclear engineer)
Basic Medical
Diplomacy (May hire 1 hostile crew member)
Mind-Link (+5% acceleration)
Basic Sciences
Advanced Sciences (Michael counts as a scientist)

Starting Funds: 500m + 34 from Titles = 534m

Starship

RV East of Eden

"Pride of the Beatrice R&D Shipyard Division, the East of Eden (originally named, Enterprise, as a homage to the fictional starships that inspired its unconventional design) was completed shortly before Michael Han and Anna Tse's historic rediscovery of Earth. Upon receiving their five hundred million credit exploration grant, they rechristened the ship and thoroughly overhauled its systems and interior. While the inclusion of Mana technology was vital for its journey, critics noted that many of the changes--such as the swimming pool, the dance club and the captain's penthouse--lent themselves more to a luxury starliner than a research vessel. This, combined with the carousing antics of the largely amateur crew, promoted web personality "Sarble the Eye" to dub the East of Eden, "The Good Ship Lollypop."

But Beatrice shared in the prestige of Han and Tse's discovery, and with the promise of untold billions in Heraldic salvage, were ready to indulge their alumni's extravagance. Curiously enough, however, somewhere along its refitting the East of Eden took on aspects of a warship, with the installation of sturdy shields and various energy weapons that were not expected to be necessary.

As it would turn out, their inclusion was a wise move, though regrettably not enough to avert disaster . . ."

--McCrea, Tran "RV East of Eden", Galacticpedia, Page Update: FS: 865.96

Class: Enterprise (Cruiser)

Cost: x2
Weapons Slots: 14 (6 on each side, two on front)
Length: 200 meters
Crew: 240
Rooms: 12 + 4 (Beatrice R&D) = 16
Average Acceleration: 20m/s2
- (+5% (Standard Piloting), +5% (Advanced Piloting), +5% (Mind Link), +30% (Beatrice R&D), +5% (Anne Tse), +30% (Wes Lunso), -20% (Hull Expansion x4) = +60%)
- Total Acceleration: 20m +60% = 32 m/s2
Energy Usage: ****

Manufacturer: Beatrice R&D

Base Cost: 14m - 6m (Sweet Home) = 8m (x2)
Acceleration: Moderately High (+30%)
Maneuverability: Moderately High
Hull Armor: Moderate
Rooms: +4 Rooms
Special Ability: Elusive (Others ships take longer to lock weapons. FTL drive stronger and faster)

Weapons

Light Laser x12 (6 on each side): 2+11 = 13m
Mana Blasters x1 (Front): 8m
Tesla Overcharger x1 (Front): 12m

Energy Systems

Mana Core (Cost: 70m)
- Fuel Efficiency: Very High
- Energy Output: ****
Solar Energy (Cost: 2m)
- Fuel Efficiency: Moderately Low
- Energy Output: *

Shield Systems: Heraldic Shielding

Cost: 70m -50% (Mana Core) = 35m
Defense: Very High (Mana Core)

Special Modules

Salvage Harvester (Cost: 3m)
Tractor Beam (Cost: 3m)
Composition Scanner (Cost: 5m)
Hull Repair Drones (Cost: 1m)
Teleport Jammer (Cost: 3m)
Digital Attack Dishes: (Cost: 8m)

Ship Rooms: (20)

Crew Quarters Upgrade: 1m (Does not cost a room)
Officers' Quarters: 2m
Captain's Quarters: 5m
Advanced Infirmary: 12m
Advanced Evacuation: 9m
Fancy Mess Hall/Tavern: 7+1=8m
Laboratory: 3m
Lounge/Recreational Room/Observatory: 0+1+2=3m
Second Lounge: Free, does not take up a room (Anne Tse)
Cargo Space/Engineering Bay/Hanger Bay: 0+3+6=9m
Hanger Bay x5: 6x7=35m
Arsenal/Teleporting Room: 4+4=8m
Meeting Room/Digital Security Room: 2+3=5m
Gravity Control Room: 2m
Training Room: 2m
Hydroponic Garden/Aquaculture Room: 1+2=3m
Hull Extension x2: 12m

Crew Members

Co-Pilots/Second-in-Command

Anne Tse: Free (Sweet Home)
- Training: Moderately High
- Experience: Low
- Alignment: Neutral
- +5% acceleration, 1 free Lounge
Wes Lunso: 6m
- Training: Moderately Low
- Experience: Very High
- Alignment: Neutral
- +30% acceleration if neutral

Engineers

Alena Bach: 2m
- Profession: Mechanical
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alignment: Neutral
Reid Enos: 7m
- Profession: Nuclear
- Skill Level: Very High
- Alignment: Neutral

Doctors

Bethany Parks: 1m
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alignment: Federation

Ship Gunners

Vis'yeth: 5m
- Skill Level: Moderately High
- Alignment: Pirates (Diplomacy smooths out conflict with Federation crew members.)
- +Boost to Energy, Blaster

Chefs/Bartenders

Vito Lazano: 4m
- Profession: Chef
- Alignment: Neutral
Carolyn Brooks: 3m
- Profession: Bartender
- Alignment: Neutral

Combat & Security

Pierre Mikisugi: 2m
- Armor: Moderately Low
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alignment: Neutral
Sgt. Raul Miller: 3m
- Armor: Moderate
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alingment: Federation

Digital Security Officers

Erica 761: 2m
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alignment: Neutral

Scientists

Sarah Escher: 3m
- Skill Level: Moderately High
- Alignment: Neutral
Wilhelm von Welch: 9m
- Skill Level: Extremely High
- Alignment: Neutral

Crew Archtypes

Volunteers: Free
- Skill Level: Low
- Alignment: Neutral
Civilians Workers: 1m
- Skill Level: Moderately Low
- Alignment: Neutral
Researchers: 2m
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alignment: Neutral
Explorers: 2m
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Alignment: Neutral
Androids: 10m
- Skill Level: Very High
- Alignment: Neutral
Controllers: 16m
- Skill Level: Extremely High
- Alignment: Neutral

Total Cost of East of Eden: 376m

Fighters

BRD Magellan Class Shuttle (x2)

A Beatrice R&D shuttle intended for in-system transportation. Sturdy and fast. Carries two weeks provisions. Can be used to land on Earth and dock with the abandoned Herald station.

Class: Shuttle [*]

Cost: x1
Weapon Slots: 4 (2 Front, 2 Sides)
Length: 30m
Max Crew: 12
Rooms: 0
Average Acceleration: 60m/s2
- (+30% Beatrice R&D)
- Total Acceleration: 60 +30% = 78 m/s2
Evergy Usage: *
No FTL drive
Both docked with East of Eden. Each takes up four hanger spaces.

Manufacturer: Beatrice R&D

Base Cost: 14m - 6m (Sweet Home) = 8m (x1)
Acceleration: Moderately High (+30%)
Maneuverability: Moderately High
Hull Armor: Moderate
Rooms: N/A
Special Ability: Elusive (Others ships take longer to lock weapons.)

Weapons

Light Laser Cannon (x3): 3m

Energy Systems

Fuel Cells (Cost: 6m)
- Energy Output: ***
- Fuel Efficiency: Low
Solar Energy (Cost: 2m)
- Energy Output: *
- Fuel Efficency: Moderately Low

Shield Systems: Advanced Shielding

Cost: 24 - 50% (Fuel Cells) = 12m
Defense: Moderately High

Special Modules

Composition Scanner: 5m

Pilot Archtypes

Wingman: 1m
- Skill Level: Moderate
- Shuttle Pilots

Total Cost for Shuttles: 37 x 2 = 74 - 30% (multiple ship discount) = 51m

Drones

BRD Hewland-7 Explorer Drones (x6)

Reliable drones useful for both exploration and construction. Versatile.

Class: Drone [*]

Cost: x1
Weapon Slots: 1 (Front)
Length: 3m
Max Crew: N/A
Rooms: N/A
Average Acceleration: 120m/s2
- (+30% Beatrice R&D)
- Total Acceleration: 120 +30% = 156 m/s2
Evergy Usage: *
No FTL drive
All six docked with East of Eden. Each takes up one hanger space.

Manufacturer: Beatrice R&D

Base Cost: 14m - 6m (Sweet Home) = 8m (x1)
Acceleration: Moderately High (+30%)
Maneuverability: High
Hull Armor: Low
Rooms: N/A
Special Ability: Elusive (Others ships take longer to lock weapons.)

Weapons:

Light Laser Cannon: 1m
- Note: Lasers are stored on the East of Eden. Drones are usually deployed with salvage harvesters. While docked, however, the units can be swapped out.

Energy Systems

Fuel Cells (Cost: 6m)
- Energy Output: ***
- Fuel Efficiency: Low
Solar Energy (Cost: 2m)
- Energy Output: *
- Fuel Efficiency: Moderately Low

Special Modules

Salvage harvesters: 3m
Composition Scanner: 5m

Total Cost of Drones: 25 x 6 = 150/Spoiler - 30% (Multiple ship discount) = 105m

Vehicles

Condor Aircar (x2)

Luxury model anti-gravity car. One in each shuttle. Useful, if impractical, for exploring Earth's surface. Can seat six. No shields. No weapons. Low armor. Can fly and is vacuum-proof, but not intended for long space travel.

Class: Air Car [*]

Cost: x0.25
Weapon Slots: N/A
Length: 6m
Max Crew: 6
Rooms: N/A
Average Velocity: 500 m/s
- (+20% Civilian)
- Maximum Velocity: 500 +20% = 600 m/s
Evergy Usage: *
No FTL drive
One in each shuttle. Each takes up one hanger space.

Manufacturer: Civilian (Condor)

Base Cost: 6m (x2)
Acceleration: High (+30%)
Maneuverability: High
Hull Armor: Low
Rooms: N/A
Special Ability: Looks cool.

Energy Systems

Solar Energy (Cost: 2m)
- Energy Output: *
- Fuel Efficiency: Moderately Low

Total Cost: 8 x 0.25 = 2 x 2 = 4 -30% (Mulitple ship discount) = 2.8m

Cost so far: 375 + 51 + 105 + 3 = 534m

Titles

The Rogue: +5m
The Traveler: +12m

17 x 2 (Ship Class) = 34

Contracts
None yet

[*] The rules don't account for shuttlecraft, drones or ground vehicle stats, so I added my own.

Well, next up is a Golden Horde entry. By the way, is anyone actually reading any of this, or am I getting likes purely because of pretty pictures? Oh well, I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm my own target audience.

JMHthe3rd's CYOA Fiction

Recent threadmarks

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

JMHthe3rd

Recent threadmarks