JB LXXXII: Force Majeure
London Geofront
Legal Compliance Division
One Day Ago
Looking out from the corner office onto a beautiful view of the London Geofront in all its Union-controlled glory, Alice Simmons steals a glance at her billable-hours timehack floating in the top right corner of her vision. She probably should take a break, considering that it's saying that of the last 48 hours, 45 have been spent on her current project, but she's enough of a workaholic to have cashed in a good chunk of her compensation package on replacing her liver with a Progenitor-built organ that does the same thing, but four times more efficiently, removes fatigue toxins faster than they build up, and doesn't suffer from damage from alcohol or the drug glands that keep feeding her enough KeepAwake that she no longer needs to sleep for more than 4 hours every month. It's also telling her that her associates and paralegals are probably going to go above the recommended toxicity levels within the next several hours, which means that she should probably either finish this project quickly or have to deal with doing all the grunt work herself.
She chooses the latter, confident that it's almost done. She has spent literal decades navigating the legal battlefield as a senior partner in the Syndicate Enforcers' Legal Compliance Division. They get moderately less attention than the other forms of enforcement the Syndicate can bring to bear, due to many of
those involving copious amounts of high-explosives and other forms of mayhem, but in her experience, there is nothing as incredibly disruptive as a company realizing that they are about to be sued for a sum of money large enough to make anyone who invested in them very, very sad. The Syndicate is aware of it, which is why she has a nice corner office with high-class furnishings and a view people would literally kill for.
'Disruptive' is exactly what she wants here, rather than actually getting the conflict resolved as quickly as possible. She isn't serving them in good faith-Pentex wouldn't understand the concept if it slapped them in the face. She's being deliberately dilatory. She's being as obtuse and vague as possible. She's making absurd requests on behalf of people who never asked for representation, possibly causing Pentex's internal staff to eat each other again (sometimes literally) in an attempt to find and purge the 'whistleblower' who leaked these conditions.
Her magnum opus is dozens of pages of the most stilted legalese she can write, guaranteed to render people incoherent with rage. And with Pentex's known behaviors they'll try to cut their losses by doing the absolute minimum to cover up the truth behind the allegations-actions that will merely cause a cascade failure in their already problematic discipline and training. They'll be given quick classes on "laws of war," just enough to make an excuse when it hits the courts-courses which will make them double-think themselves when it matters the most-and the HR department talking about discrimination and how it damages morale and interpersonal relations will have the perverse result of doing exactly that.
And with a stroke of the pen signing the final complaint, she's caused as much damage to Pentex's efficiency and combat-effectiveness as a team of crack saboteurs. Moments like this is why she loves her job.
**********************************************************************************************************************
The pair of Hinds hangs high, above the low-lying cloud. They are, naturally, both loudly playing Ride of the Valkyries, at a volume which could even be heard above the noise of the rotors and the pulsing of the heartbeat in the machine.
"Aww, come on, sarge," Squaddie Wilson complains, playing with his knife. "Why do we always have to listen to this old shit?"
The hulking figure of his shirtless, scar-covered sergeant punches him in the jaw. "Shut your mouth, you fucker," the older man growls. He looks like an eighties action hero mid-way through their steroid-induced meltdown. "This is part of your history! Part of what we're all fighting for! It was written for the best film of the seventies! Apocalypse Now!" He shakes his head, wiping away a tear on his wolfskin scarf. "Colonel Kurtz is my hero," he whispers. "So listen up, maggots!"
"Yes, sarge!" the other six fully conscious members of the First Team in the back snap back instantly. They're the elite. They're better than the ground pounders in the APCs. They're also amped up on far more experimental combat drugs and have undergone deliberate amputation and grafting of limbs from other test subjects so they have multiple banes bound into their flesh and their fetish-limbs.
"Here we are, going up against Willy yet again! There's going to be lots of Willys down here! A fuckload! I want a nice clean deployment! We are the tip of the spear! We're going to be hitting these fuckers once they've expended their assets against the ground forces."
The radios crackle. "Charlie One is down! Repeat Charlie One is down! Unknown attackers!" That's one of the front-leading APCs. Clearly it's walked into a Gaian ambush.
"We're going to tear them apart and eat them in the name of the Wyrm," Jenny Mother-Fucker snarls. She's leading the pack of werewolves in the cargo hold, and while the fomori shock troopers are superficially dressed in a military style, no such rule applies to the Black Spiral Dancers who are barring one exception all in near-man form. Although most of them are wearing a mess of bane-fetishes made from military equipment, the weapons and gear come from thousands of years of human violence, or from the depths of Malfeas itself. Jenny herself is fully decked out in Malfean bane-bound brass, a gift from her very affectionate mother, and her armor bleaches the seat just from its irradiated proximity.
"I'm gonna get me some of their puppies," Red Scare growls, drooling notably. He's already in Crinos form, because that's the only way he can carry the vehicle-scale flamethrower equipment strapped onto his hulking form. His smell is filling the cabin. "I'll cook 'em and then eat 'em wh-"
There is no warning of a radar lock. No desperate attempts to evade. There's just the explosion and the sudden feeling of weightlessness.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," the pilot screams over the intercom. She's fused to the helicopter itself, a torso protruding from the living machine, and she's screaming in pain. "My rotors!"
"What the fuck?" Jenny yells. "Brace for impact!"
**********************************************************************************************************************
Fire.
Noise.
It's hell down here, and not in the way she's fond of. Jenny crawls out of the wreckage, spitting teeth, and winces as new ones force their way through her jaw. Her mouth is filled with her own blood and when she screams it's just a gargle. She's bitten her tongue off. She works her arm as the broken bone knits itself together. Ahead of her, there's another burning crash site, from the other helicopter. It's bleeding ichor from its broken open hull, and another Black Spiral Dancer is painfully crawling from the wreckage.
"What the fuck!" she shouts, once she gets her tongue working again. She spits the remnants of her old one out.
Red Scare bursts from the wreckage, carrying his flamethrower. He sprays the woods wildly-and then there is a sharp crack of a gunshot, the pitch too high to be a normal firearm. For a moment, it looks like whoever shot missed-and then Jenny notices the hole in the fuel tanks and the Black Spiral Dancer explodes into a ball of sickly greenish fire. The tanks on his back have ignited, and he runs screaming and flailing and mewling, off into the woods. Jenny gives a mad grin at that. The bastard still isn't dying despite all that? Hah. Tougher than she thought. Of course-the sight of this causes some of the formori, the ones in the armored vehicles or the less-armored Humvees, to break and run from cover, to be cut down by unseen weapons. It's strange, how easily these worthless human Bane-hosts break. She thought they had a little more backbone than that.
"Help me," the pilot mewls at her over her radio. She ignores it and concentrates at breaking open the hold so the other survivors from her pack can crawl out. And look! There are even two fomors left alive!
"Get in front," she snarls, hefting her blade at the horribly burned messes of flesh.
"What the fuck was that?" Gut-Gnawer snapped at her, shifting into Crinos form. He's lost his minigun to the flames, so he's only got his envenomed blades and those work best when he has the tank-like bulk of his ultimate form behind him. "Where'd those fuckers get stuff that'd down us? Both choppers are down and the bosses are going to be fucking pissed."
Jenny shrugged. "They better be more afraid of me. Because they didn't tell use these tree fuckers had stuff like this."
"Yeah." Gut-Gnawer stabs at a tree, which immediately begins to wilt and die. "Jumped up banes try giving us shit for this, we'll fucking nut them and then... look! Enemies!" He points at strange black-clad soldiers in body armor Jenny's never seen escorted by black-painted robots, carrying over-large rifles that flash blue when they fire. There's something creepy about them. Jenny is used to creepy in the sense of formori and the disgusting, body horror things of the Wyrm, but this is a different sort. It's machinelike precision, absolute silent movement. Even the gunshots are strangely muted, despite how the explosive bullets burst into small fountains of mud and debris as they track enemies.
The cluster of humanoid figures creeping on the crash site light them up, in a blaze of automatic weapons fire and grenades. Jenny leaps over the first scything line of fire, and then lets Gut-Gnawer take the strangely-homing grenades for her. Bulking up into Crinos, she vents a considerable amount of her extensive frustration with this mission, letting the black hate of the Wyrm guide her blows. The fuckers are fast-but not fast enough, almost as if they're managed from somewhere else. She bites down into one of the soldiers, ripping large chunks of it out and swallowing them. She gags and almost throws up. They're not alive. Not delicious. They're made out of something unliving, sterile. She spits out white synth plasma and masticated artificial muscle and goes to hunt down more. They fall from her hate, and the hate of her pack. One by one, but even as they do, Red Scare's flaming form is hit by
something and disappears in a sickly wet crack, leaving only a pair of legs smelling faintly of ozne.
She has the last attacker held by the throat. Leaning in, she sniffs with her almost bat-like, malformed wolf-nose. It smells of crystal, of steel and brass and coldness and clinical antiseptic absolution. "Weaverscum," she grinds, and crushes it in her hand, tossing the husk away.
Gut-Gnawer is howling in a mix of pain and rage. "Weaver! Weaver!" he gibbers, scampering over to snatch up one of the heavy weapons from the fallen combat robots. He tries firing it, and it promptly explodes in his hand, removing his arm up to the shoulder.
[Sorry, you do not qualify for a thirty day trial,] the remnants of the weapon he dropped states. [Please contact your nearest representative for processing, Reality Deviant scum.]
"Idiot," Jenny snarls. "How fucking stupid do you have to be to try that?" She takes a breath. "Listen! So the fucking weaverspawn are here! They're fucking human scum! Humans who think their tricks from the Weaver can defeat the Gaian fools here, let alone us! We are the true Garou! Our bloody legacy has claimed almost all the chosen of Gaia! We have the hate of the Wyrm! We have his strength! All the powers of Malfeas ride with us! To victory! To bloodshed! To triumph!"
"Mother-Fucker," Elise Finger-Keeper snarls, "Smell that! On the wind! Weaverscum, and their vehicles on the other side of those trees! And there are weak humans there! Not just machines!"
"Kill them all!"
The Black Spiral Dancers charge off, and then find that the area had been comprehensively mined ahead of time.
"Fucking weaverscum!"
**********************************************************************************************************************
Bleeding from countless puncture wounds which have got through her armour, stunned and shocked by the countless waves of explosions and feeling
fucking hungry from all the regeneration she's had to do, Jenny falls to her knees.
It's like fighting mist. The fucking weaverscum refuse to stand and fight. They fall back. They send those goddamn robots to slow them down. There are fucking landmines everywhere. And somehow there are also fucking pits with fucking sharp silver tipped stakes at the bottom. How the fuck are those things in the area? Maybe the Gaian fuckers put them there.
Oh, she's seen the enemy. Fast moving cars which just fire grenades at her and then run away. Humans in pathetic armor, ropy with black muscle like some kind of parody of her Crinos form, which somehow means they can move faster, without any spirit blessings. Fucking Weaver and the way it gives these humans way to do things without the spirits. Suits of armor the size of her in Crinos form - or maybe just one suit of armor. She isn't fucking sure because every time she tries to close, she winds up standing on
another fucking landmine.
And there's one big one. Clearly the one in charge, because it's the biggest and most powerful. It's bigger than even her in Crinos, and she's large for a Garou. And it's the one which shot down the helicopters! It's covered in missiles and carrying large guns and last time she saw it, it gunned down the two remaining members of her pack.
Well, she has a trump. Her mother told her to be wary of it, but fuck her. She isn't here right now! She's back somewhere safe! Fuck everything! Her pack's dead and - she feels tears well up - and it hurts, Wyrm dammit! It hurts in a bad way!
This came right from Special Projects, though, and they used to be weaverscum before they realized the true power of the Wyrm. This'll let her win!
Growling, she pulls an oversized syringe out, the bright-green-glow of it rippling as it passes out from her armor of Malfean brass. In one motion, she injects the entire turkey-baster-sized contents into her abdomen. She can feel the tens of banes in the fluid getting to work, twisting and warping and desecrating her flesh. She howls to the clouded sky as her muscles bulk and swell, her hair falling out only to be replaced by brass strands. A rack of ten long octopodal tentacles burst out from under the armour of her back, covered in eyes and teeth and leech-like mouths, only for four of them to knit together into insectoid wings. Cloven hooves, great ram-like horns, faces upon her flesh which gibber and moan and sing praises to the Maeljin... all of these flow across her flesh. It hurts so very much. In the last remnants of her sanity, such that remained to a child of incest born to a family which had worshipped the Wyrm for generations, she screams. It hurts! She didn't mean this!
And then one of the banes reaches her brain and squirms into it, giving her certainty. She can feel the Wyrm overtaking her.
It is a good pain.
"Kill," she grates out. "Burn. Maim." She lets the voices in her head guide her. On all fours, the vegetation around her igniting from the radiation which pours off her skin, she charges off leaving a wake of devastation behind her.
**********************************************************************************************************************
If it wasn't for the grotesqueness of the fucked-up Murklake employes she's killing, Henriette would almost be having fun. Their vehicles have been killed, although she's slightly annoyed that one of the BMPs and both Hinds were because of
Princess Antoinette revealing that yes, her armor has shoulder-fired multirole missile launchers capable of anti-air and anti-armor work in equal effectiveness, and that yes, it's a fully automated system so her questionable skill never comes into play.
"So, Henriette. Are you satisfied with my performance now?" She asks, as she makes a sweeping gesture and a few synth units slaved to her tactical computer overrun a desperate gaggle of Murklake employees, assisting a small team of MiB in tactical gear. They seem to have shot their commanding officer-they've become a disorganized mob rather than a trained military force, and it makes them easier to deal with. A few of them raise their hands in surrender and are quickly surrounded by the fast, perfectly loyal synths. One of the MiBs cocks his head and asks about the rules of engagement. "What are our orders to deal with prisoners?"
Kiet and Financier Sykes reply immediately, simultaneously. "Nephandi. No prisoners. Sterilize the remains as a class-two biohazard." Antoinette shuts off the feed. She doesn't want to watch the NWO and the Iteration X synths methodically shoot every Murklake employee in the back of the head, and then burn their corpses with an incendiary grenade each. She wants to say something to Henriette, ask if the other woman has seen something like this and how she deals with it-but no. She has to look strong. She can't be shown up by Henriette. After all, she's Antoinette Sylia. She's a genius. She's mastered materials sciences that most Iteration X scientists take half a century to learn, in a decade and a half. She's built a suit of combat armor people would die to possess, on her own. She's going to show her Convention that she's as tough as any of them and that they should give her the respect she deserves.
"There's two furries in your vicinity, deal with them." Henriette says curtly. "You can manage that, right?"
"Of course I can, o Queen Henriette." Antoinette says sarcastically, putting on a very exaggerated French accent. "If milady desires it thy will be done." She dodges the first, firing a needle-spray of microexplosives into its gut. They explode, and it whimpers. The other tackles her, and even through the centimeter-thick environmentally-sealed combat armor, she feels unclean as it tries to rip her armor off of her, caustic drool dripping onto her faceplate.
It's strong-phenomenally strong, and it has leverage. Her power is low, and she can't afford to use many of her most advanced tricks anymore. For a moment she's afraid, but she has the armor's strength and a few lower-technology tricks. She struggles, causing them to roll through the mud and filth on the ground. When she comes to a stop, it's still on top, snarling threats about what it wants to do to her "delectable body" once it peels her out of that "weaver-damned shell" of hers, but she has a free hand in the space between them. She moves it upwards to the thing's hairy, well-muscled chest, and fires the single-shot palm bomb. The planar explosives lining the palm of her suit detonate, and she rolls the corpse off. "No means no." She turns around and scans the environment just as a massive mechanical fist pulps the second Black Spiral Dancer.
"How are you so bad at this?" Henriette asks, shaking the gore off her kinetic ram. "You spent all that time making that power suit and... what? Forgot that you'd actually need to pilot it? You're welcome, by the way."
"It's not like that! Anyway, I could have done that myself!" Antoinette replies. "Besides you have the advantage of several extra tons of armor while dealing with these... perverted rape monsters!"
"If you're freaked out by those scrubs," Henriette chides, putting confidence in her voice that she doesn't quite feel, "you're never going to manage to get into a real fight. There's another handful of EDE hosts trying to break the perimeter, and they've somehow gotten enough rockets and machine-guns from their Humvees to actually threaten the MiB. Looks like they're taking casualties. Because of your sloppy mine dispersal patterns."
"I had to cover the road! Statistical forecasts said they'd mostly come that way. And look how they're being cut to shreds.
You're welcome, like you said!" Antoinette doesn't wait for a reply before bouncing off on the suit's jump boosters to rescue the beleaguered NWO commandos.
A horrible Wyrm-tainted war-beast smashes through the trees and towards Henriette. "Oh what the fuck," Henriette mouths at the sight of the heavily armored and mutated wolf-thing the size of a tank bounding towards her, glowing green and with its sword held in its teeth. "That's just wrong." Before this, her day was great. But now one of the last surviving shapeshifters - silly little werewolves, bringing helicopters that aren't ARCs to an Union fight - has turned out to be a fan of My Little Body Horror: Phallic Imagery Is Magic, and it's ruining both her composure and her mood. Brass, tentacles and green fire, what a combination. The Variform Ground Vehicle responds to her at the speed of thought, an extension of herself as she switches her attention from piloting her body - secured in the transforming cockpit by the smartgel of the seat - to piloting the VGV in earnest.
The first thing she does is start cycling from regular HEAP railgun rounds to the hyper-penetrator rounds. With a flare of her thrusters, she steps back, barely evading the three lamprey-mouthed tentacles with their rotating teeth that were aimed for her left leg. She opens the firing ports of the GPMGs on her hips, spraying bullets at the loping shapeshifter, not aiming to wound as she falls back, buying space to blast the bloody thing.
Not fast enough. Her radiological alarms start screaming and she can feel her paint flaking off under the green corona that surrounds the shapeshifter, and she's thrown off-balance when its tentacles close on her from both sides.
Why, damn it, she asks herself,
why do I have to be the one that ends up fighting a bloody tentacle monster.
Her shoulder joints strain as the EDE tries to wrench her arms off, and despite the integrity warnings she grins as the shapeshifter pauses its mad babbling chant of BURN KILL MAIM to try and bite her face off. Henriette's ADEI pings with a message from the little power-suit princess outside. Clear a firing line? Bah!
Clearly, the stupid thing never fought Iteration X before (or it'd be dead, but that's beside the point). If your mouth is level with an Iterator's head, your eyes are level with their antimissile lasers.
The flickering bursts of the electrolaser that rip through the green corona into the shapeshifter's eyes precede a howl of agony that is viscerally satisfying to Henriette, especially when the reflex-reaction of the shapeshifter leads it to leap away from the burning agony in its eyes.
There, here's your line of fire, she pulses back to Sylia, who lances it with a high-power plasma cannon, blowing a very satisfying chunk out of it.
By the time the mutant freak gets its bearing again, leaping for Sylia of all things, her railgun has finished its reload cycle, and she grins widely.
The first shot sweeps the tank-sized werewolf off its four limbs as it thrashes its mouth back and forth, trying to thrust its giant-sized blade through Antoinette. But as the creature tumbles in the air, her sensors tell her that she has at best scratched the beast.
Her second shot ricochets off the werewolf's armor -
what! that's cheating! two voices say in unison - as the beast turns its fall into a roll.
Her third shot smashes into the werewolf - but even as it does so, the bloody thing aims all its tentacles at her, slimy, fleshy growths inlaid with strange brass runes undulating as all eight explosively disgorge green plasm at her. She tries to roll away, but it catches her across the chest and neck, sticky, slimy, running down her body.
Her radiological and damage alarms blare again, more insistently, but she pays them not attention. Antoinette is saying something, but she can't pay attention to that, either, even as the other woman launches a brace of concussive missiles at her to blast the radioactive slime off her body.
No, what she's paying attention to is the bloody werewolf. Her thrusters flare sun-bright, and she shudders as Antoinette's missiles hit her and then she shoulder-charges the werewolf that was about to cut the other Iterator in half
again. Its enormous brass blade screeches over her body and
oh god it hurts, but this time, this time she's got a proper angle at the bloody thing. She kicks it in the face, once, twice, thrice, but it gets up again.
What does it take to keep this thing down!? Henriette wonders as she grabs the three tentacles coming for her in one hand, pulling, throwing the Shapeshifter off balance, allowing Antoinette to unleash a withering hail of nanoinjectors. Half of them burn up in the thing's crazy battle-aura, a quarter fails to get through its scraping brass-like bristles, but the remainder gets in, a catastrophically lethal silver-based incendiary.
Finally, progress. Henriette remembers Moscow, remembers what to do when your enemy is in great pain and distress -
crush them - and aims her railgun at the base of the tentacles she's holding, firing her GPMGs explosive munitions in tandem, and rips the twitching tentacles off the shapeshifter's back.
Three down, she pulses to Antoinette,
five to go.
**********************************************************************************************************************
The next minutes of the fight, Antoinette Sylia decides, are even worse than before. The VGV sways under her as the gibbering shapeshifter rears up to ram a blade the rough length and width of a stealth bomber's wing through the torso, an overhead blow that Iterator Langley catches with one hand and turns into a throw, their enemy flying wide, tumbling over mine-strewn ground.
The explosions bounce the creature around, give Langley's VGV enough time to put shot after shot into the thing, but
it keeps regenerating. Wounds that her Angel's arms could fit through scab over with blackened brass that shines with Reality Deviant runes visible even through the incessant glow of its battle-aura.
Translation pending... estimated time to completion 「 」.
Cursing, shaking her head as the runes shift and twist and burn, Antoinette Sylia braces herself against the VGV's head as Langley takes it into a sprinting run, charging the plasma cannon as they go.
The blast of pellucid cleansing fire is slowed down by the foe's aura, caught by the tentacles, which wrap around it, undulating, feeding upon it with their lamprey mouths, greedily sucking on the plasma. The micromissile barrage from
Angel sets that off, nicely, and she triumphantly pings Langley when another two of the things are blasted off the creature's back.
She takes to the air as Langley bodychecks the shapeshifter again, keeping it off-balance while using robo-kata to align the weapons of her machine on the werewolf. Antoinette has to give the bratty little princess that much, at least she knows what she's doing as a pilot.
Suspended in midair, Angel's nanofabs restock her missile pods when the shapeshifter, straddling the VGV and trying to saw its chest armor open with its blade, catches Antoinette with its tentacles. The muscular tubes undulate all over her body, constricting her movements, the fine mechanisms of her Angel starting to malfunction from the heavy radiation and the oily, shining slime that covers her now.
Somewhere in Antoinette Sylia's mind, as the third tentacle folds itself around her torso, she wonders if male Iterators have to put up with shit like this before triggering Angel's shock plates and getting back into the fray. She has an idea. "Can you give me some cover fire? I think if she can survive having her head blown off I'm going to be legitimately impressed."
"Oh, I suppose I can give you covering fire. It's not like there are any higher priority targets around." Henriette says. There aren't. The last few BSDs and formors which managed
despite all odds to keep coherent organization have managed to aggressively maneuver themselves into an ambush from NWO commandos, Jorge Bautista, and combat synths, and have been cut down in a withering hail of gunfire. Henriette's impressed by the Tyrant. With just an Iteration X-issue EM sniper rifle, he was instrumental in turning the enemy convoy into a wildly disorganized horde of psychopaths, often leading to squad leaders and commanders being 'fragged' by their own men, rather than an actual fighting force. It's saved them a lot of trouble. "Just tell me when,
princess."
Antoinette wonders if it's entirely sarcastic, or if at least some of that is affectionate. She chooses to assume it's the first. "Fine,
milady. Now!" She yells, jumping upwards to avoid a tentacle strike. The VGV fires off a spray of microbombs from the Cyclone and a fusillade of 15mm spikes, distracting the behemoth long enough for her to almost land on the nape of the shapeshifter's neck. Angel's AI is telling her that there's a radiation hazard, that there is internal systems damage and that her armor needs repair and decontamination, but she ignores it, because she's trying to find purchase in the shapeshifter's back and climb upwards, even as her magneto-fusion assault cannon charges to nearly suicide overload levels.
Fortunately, Henriette's distracted it enough, and it's got her sprawled on the ground now, trying to rip at the sensor head, one of its tentacles furiously pounding away at the cockpit area, even as the other remaining ones wrap themselves around Antoinette's legs. Antoinette fires off the shock plates for one last time, almost falls again, triggers her jets even as their cooling systems die from excessive overuse, and manages to get her MFAC in skin contact with the back of the shapeshifter's neck just in time for the weapon to fully charge and fire.
The forest turns bright white for a second, brighter than daylight. Fortunately, there are very few people around to notice the change in lighting conditions. When the flash filters deactivate, Henriette's vehicle is pinned under a unmoving, headless corpse that is rapidly disintegrating into disgusting green sludge over greenish-tinged brass bones. Antoinette tries to move, and realizes that her armor is frozen with a dozen critical failures, and that its self-repair is going to take a while. Outside conditions are hostile but survivable.
She pops the emergency exit and climbs out of the clamshell-armor, grabbing her sidearm-a P-8 light plasma pistol, with a M-5 Smartgun autoaiming module- from a storage compartment. Clad only in the lightly armored and semi-powered interface suit made out of lightweight plasteel mesh and silicone muscle fiber, she takes a tentative step... and almost immediately gags from the stench of ozone and filth. Steeling herself, she makes her way over to the fallen mecha, gropes through the sludge for an emergency ejection, and pops Henriette from it. The pilot is woozy from the feedback of a close-proximity MFAC overload, and the VGV's systems are probably in the same state of 'incapacitated and requiring recovery time' that her armor's in.
Henriette looks at her intensely, staring into her eyes for a moment. "Let us. Never. Speak of this. Again."
Antoinette nods.
"And... um... thanks." Henriette says.
"You're welcome."
"Okay can you put me down now? I'm not your wife and this is
even more embarassing."
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Part 2 of this update will deal with Kessler's Wonderful Cheaty Bastard Adventures, possibly Serafina, and maybe even Panopticon! And also give you the vote to engage in the next part of this location arc. So what are you voting for right now? Well,
what you're doing with this.
Heroes of Iteration X:
So congratulations! Your help has managed to turn this operation from a brutal slog through horrible enemy terrain into a sterling example of why you don't fuck with the Technocracy. So now with this you want to...
[ ] Insinuate to General Garrison that
he doesn't need more equipment, just closer working relationships with the other Conventions, which this operation has built.
[ ] Start grassroots canvassing of the rank-and-file, using the Heroes of The Technocracy as your faces to show what the current military assets of Iteration X can do.
[ ] Go to Ada personally to ask that she increase military funding.
[ ] Some of the above.
Choose 2 of the 3.
[ ] None of the above (write-in).
Fat Lutes:
Choose three fat lutes to get with your
horrible murder spree. MMO Economics is the best kind of economics! You can choose one category multiple times, but in that case you need to choose a subcategory.
[ ] New Hires! Go headhunt someone like:
[ ] Antoinette Sylia.
[ ] Major Clarent.
[ ] Yuuki Sajaki and her Pet Drones.
[ ] A Syndicate Enforcer Associate because LAW.
[ ] Equipment!
[ ] Vehicles!
[ ] Guns!
[ ] Cyborg augmentations!
[ ] Robots!
[ ] Good robots like HITMarks.
[ ] Shitty robots.
[ ] Influence!
[ ] In the form of tech.
[ ] In the form of favors.
[ ] In the form of mundane stuff.
[ ] In the form of a share in the Node you've just captured and are going to be milking for Prime Energy.
[ ] Just give us the cold hard dosh. (Can be chosen multiple times).
