- Location
- in the trash
There are dozens of examples in the thread. Give me a sec.
9d10e7 (e7 means 7 or higher are successes) at +2 difficulty. Not 9d10e9.
We have been doing it this way throughout the entire quest.
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Panopticon: A Game of Posthumans, Perniciousness, Paranoia, Politics, and Plasmaguns
There are dozens of examples in the thread. Give me a sec.
9d10e7 (e7 means 7 or higher are successes) at +2 difficulty. Not 9d10e9.
We have been doing it this way throughout the entire quest.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
what no
why would you advise this
Flavor-wise, Mage Revised (especially the Revised Conventionbooks) is the appropriate setting, but even then that's not the mechanics system. It's a hack of MJ's Aberrant rewrite. M20 is the last thing you need or want.
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- Location
- Brazil
You know, I've been brushing up on Mage lore.
And Ascension seems like, ten times more interesting than Awakening. Is that just me?
And Ascension seems like, ten times more interesting than Awakening. Is that just me?
Sirrocco
Pedantic
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Different versions of World of Darkness did different things with difficulty. One was "subtracts successes". The other was "this or higher to get a success". The latter is the newer, and I believe it's the one in us
- Location
- Brazil
... Wait a fucking minute, Socrates founded/leaded the Traditions as Old Men Senex?
Man, I'm in love with this.
Man, I'm in love with this.
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Update CCXI: Spider and Fly
JB CCXI: Spider and Fly
"Pilot Langley," Ling sends by DNI. She finds it much easier than speaking normally, but most people can't handle communicating this way. It'd take them many, many seconds to talk like this - but here and now both of them are plugged into high end war machines and are thinking faster than baseline humans can.
"Pilot Clarent," she gets back, a familiar 'voice' in her mind. "I'm surprised. You're handling yourself differently."
"Yours is not." She can't track down precisely where the signal is coming from - but then again, she's shielded herself too. The damage to her mimetic camo is heavy too, so she's not got as much to lose. "You're still overconfident. And an inferior Iterator. And a deviant individual. And-"
"I'm sorry."
The words strike Ling like a kinetic impactor. She doesn't have a response. Because she's focusing on her weapons management and trying to track down Henriette, of course.
"No, really, I am." A sigh - a false vocalization injected into a DNI-to-DNI conversation. "I was a pretty awful person as a teenager. I went after you because you were a threat to... to what I wanted. Because you'd sometimes beat me in sims. And I am sorry for that. Since we last met, I've had to grow up a lot. Basically, I was kind of a bitch to you. So I have a lot of things to say sorry for."
"Your apologies mean nothing." Ling deploys a high power ground penetrating radar to hunt for the annoying voice. She just needs to keep her distracted, until she shoots her down in flames.
"I talked quite a lot with Major Jane Clarent. Before this current thing, I mean. I didn't know what it meant to be a Clarent before. I thought it was just a surname. And then I talked more with her after she realized what the traitor Gregor was up to."
"Stop attempting psychological warfare on me."
"No, that's the truth." Henriette pauses. "It makes sense why they'd pick you for their little attempted coup. You believe what you're told. You don't ask inconvenient questions. Here - have the actual facts on the ground."
Ling immediately purges the file squirt. She's not an idiot to open an EM-warfare package like that.
"Urgh, you didn't even read it, did you? Well, long story short, we're the ones directly following Command's orders. You've been tricked by a corrupt Progenitor into supporting a coup against the Technocratic Union. And I don't blame you." There's a soft chuckle. "You don't have a disloyal bone in your body. And you're much younger than Jane and haven't learned to overcome what they did to you, like she has."
Ling's stomach feels hot. Not the kind of hot it feels around Sanjeet. The kind of hot it feels around Yinzheng Li. In fact, Henriette Langley is sounding wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong! She's too soft. She sounds almost kind. Henriette doesn't sound soft. She's never kind. She's spiky and unkind. Is that even her, rather than some drone imitating her? But no, it's handling just like her.
Which is to say, really annoyingly.
"I don't want to have to hurt you," Henriette's voice says. "You're just following orders. If you power down your unit, you won't be sanctioned for this. And if it helps, I'll also let you slap me a few times. I deserve it."
"You can't make me turn traitor just by promising to let me slap you." Without asking, Ling's brain provides the mental image of her bringing her hand into Henriette's face. It does feel... good.
"Would punches do instead?"
"You're making fun of me!" It comes out as an exclamation rather than a flat statement.
"Look, I'm trying to say sorry to someone who's literally betraying the Union right now." Henriette appears to have reached the end of her infamously short amounts of patience. "I'm trying to give you a chance. A chance you deserve because I know more about what happened to you Clarents than I did when I was a bitchy teenager. Are you going to power down or not?"
Ling responds, not with words, but with the weapons systems of her vehicle. She doesn't need a chance from Henriette. She's working for Control. Control loves her. She knows that they are the enemies of Control. Control hates them. So she hates them too. They must be destroyed. For who is she, to question a god? She tracks the holoechoes, and opens fire with everything she has. Flechettes, explosive shells, plasma lances and missiles slice through the air, but find only decoys and deceptions. The cloud of perfect duplicate ARC-II echoes converges again for a moment, then splits apart into yet another swarm. Ling accepts that by concentrating all weapons on Henriette, she is allowing the other ARC Is and IIs to avoid damage, which is a long-term threat to the survival of her allies. But it is necessary for mission completion that she do so. Henriette Langley, Ling considers, is significant enough that all her attentions must be focused on her.
When Henriette responds with inferno gel, Ling doesn't bother to evade. The temperature readouts of her war machine spike from the blue-hot flames of the incendiary munitions, but Ling is aware of the specifications of the AAMV-1998. It is designed to survive charging through a still-rising mushroom cloud, its cockpit and systems shielded by solid-state cooling against the heat. Ling considers for a moment why she would be targeted by the inferno gel-a powerful weapon against most infantry and vehicles-and in her distraction, realizes that they are intended to cover for heavier weapons a heartbeat too late. She takes a multi-dozen G jump with the spidertank's powerful legs and gravitics, but too late, as the HVMs follow her evasive maneuver and pierce her war machine's hull.
The first HVM hits near one of the heavy machinegun turrets on the sides and rear of the spidertank. The outer hull is thinner there, weakened by the 15-millimeter machinegun's presence. The warhead penetrates, a white-hot lance of starfire cooking off the caseless machinegun ammunition and cutting into vital systems. Ling notices the brief pause in functionality as damaged components are bypassed and self-repair initiates. Minor damage, a handful of primary sensor feeds cut and information being temporarily fed through secondary sensors, the advanced-but-still-mundane machinegun turret and its cheaper alloy armor turned into slag. She notes that it reduces the multiped's ability to cover against infantry assault, which might be a long-term concern as it is clear that the enemy is gaining an advantage. The second hits thicker armor, missing its targeted impact point because of her jump, and the HVM only punches through the outer armor, its force dispersed by the inner nanocomposite long before it penetrates to the mass storage and the core internal armoring. The wound immediately begins to heal. Ling confirms that her war machine's mass intake systems are still working, and that it is still fabricating replacement armor, systems, and missiles to replace the ones she has expended.
The AAMV-1998 has additional ordinance capability, but it is only mundane. The antipersonnel blisters lack the range to hit Henriette's ARC II. And masses-built air to air missiles wouldn't work. Henriette's ARC II is invisible to their primitive seeker heads, as are the other Damage Control air units. So she relies on direct-fire weapons instead. Plasma lances, the multiped's heavy gatling cannon. She does not wish to risk her heaviest weapon until she can get a confirmed kill shot. Meanwhile, the other Damage Control airborne units harass her, their missiles exploding around her as they are deflected or spoofed or shot down. Most of the missiles the Progenitor-engineered militarized cephalopods and their ARCs carry are mundane. Hellfires, Vikhrs, and other missiles that are easily jammed or intercepted. But in their midst there are assassin's daggers hidden, Iteration X-built munitions with their own predatory intellects, using the swarms of mundane missiles as cover and distraction and sensors network all at once. The automated guns target the swarm, joining with the laser point defense and the airbursting fragmentation grenades to attempt hard-kills on the dangerous ones. It almost works. Another HVM smashes into a leg joint and temporarily disables the limb, the leg going rigid as she reallocates spare mass to self-repair the system. She evades, leaping away from the impact point, not wanting to risk a mobility kill or worse, not with the ORIONs around. Given enough time, they can force open the hatches on the multiped. And she's not entirely confident that the electrical discharge armor can defeat them in time.
And then her sensors see Henriette's ARC II screaming down at her in a 10-G death dive, in the narrow blindspot where her primary weapon cannot traverse. At the range it is closing to, even its ECM is insufficient to trick the multiped's advanced sensors, and she can see the real ARC II, highlighted conveniently for her. Ling twists the multiped in midair mid-jump, its weapon already tracking, as Henriette fires everything she has. Every single anti-armor smart missile the ARC II is armed with leaps into action, at a range so close that the multiped's point defense systems are overwhelmed. The plasma cannon and railgun of the ARC II fire, overcharged, and the AAMV-1998's armor protests against the impacts. She has a fraction of a second before the missiles impact as well, exploiting the still-healing, still-hot armor to pierce the nigh-invulnerable shell of the AAMV-1998 and score damage against internal systems. For her, that is more than long enough to make her decision. She could try to preserve her vehicle. It is a highly expensive, highly valuable asset. She should preserve it under normal circumstances.
But Control has ordered her to destroy the rogue forces. Control has told her that 100% materiel and personnel losses are acceptable so long as the enemy is defeated. And taking Henriette Langley down a peg makes her feel warm inside, the good kind of warm. At this range, Henriette cannot evade or defend either, and Ling has moved the ARC into the heavy railgun's line of fire. Ling fires first, plasma lances and gatling cannon and the heavy railgun. The ARC dies first, as a white-hot lance of superheated metal guts the VTOL and pierces the heavens. The shot is aimed perfectly, in line with the ARC's cockpit and fusion reactor-but somehow, Henriette has impossibly twisted the ARC just enough that the lance doesn't intersect the cockpit. Ling looks at the result of her work with disappointment-and a bare moment later, the hypervelocity missiles catch her, and then the railgun slugs do too, fired with just enough of a delay that they hit simultaneously, punching into already weakened armor from the plasma cannon hit. The micromissiles and mundane ones are just adding insult to injury. The gravitic fields around the AAMV-1998 destabilize as one of the HVMs stabs through the weakened armor and cores the main AG control computer. Ling activates the emergency eject immediately and is rocketed out at accelerations which would instantly kill a normal human being as the gravity drive of the AAMV-1998 fails and the vehicle implodes. There is no sense in spending her life at this point. Especially since Langley needs to be disabled.
She pulls the smart-pistol from the survival kit and moves towards the wreckage of the ARC, embedded into one of RIKEN's many lab buildings. Langley will be there.
Henriette comes to in hell. She doesn't believe in the Christian god, no. But even MIHT required some breadth of knowledge and some soft directives, and the scene she is observing is straight out of Dante Alleghiri's hell-or perhaps Revelations. Clouds of swarming insects seem to almost blot out the sun in distorted feeds from the ARC II's cameras. For a moment she's not sure why she's here, but then her ADEI reminds her fallible wet memory of the happenings of the last thirty seconds as the armor's medical systems start to fix her concussion.
She tried to take out the AAMV-1998 by destabilizing a gravitic engine. Risky, yes. Dangerous, often with terrifying consequences for the fabric of spacetime, yes. But against an invincible behemoth like that, paired with a pilot skilled enough at both combat and systems management that she couldn't exploit its weaknesses, it was her best shot. Perhaps, she thinks, she should have loaded some heavy antimateriel weapons, like a heavy railgun. Her attack went about as well as could be expected, but not quite as well as planned. Ling Clarent decided to try for a mutual kill, and very nearly managed exactly that. It took all her skill to turn what should have been a fatal shot for both pilot and vehicle into one which only killed the vehicle. In exchange, she cut her own war machine's survival chances to near zero. An inefficient trade, Henriette thinks. Something is wrong with Ling, she concludes.
She knows that the front half of the ARC has been embedded into one of the buildings on the RIKEN campus, and is currently protruding out of a research lab, the cockpit suspended in midair. Henriette pops the emergency escape system, the crumpled canopy ejecting on explosive bolts, and she sees parts of what was once a hyper-advanced VTOL scattered across much of the battlefield, and the warped, almost Lovecraftian mess that was once a high-end Iteration X multiped tank. She also sees that the battle is not over, but from what she understands from her tactical classes, they are winning. She sees a mutant thing that looks like a shaved shapeshifter get powerbombed through a ceiling by an ORION, while another one charges through plasma fire-disturbingly, Henriette notes, the ORION's flesh and armor melts from the hits but seems to grow back-and tears a snake-woman EDE in half. She can hear the chatter of Damage Control constables, the X-PROG 311 and ARC pilots, the armored vehicle commanders, and the voice of her own amalgam's participants-Rose and Jason-as they clear resistance. Without the AAMV-1998 and its bubble of death extending down to the horizon and up into low earth orbit, the air support and armored vehicles can spend more time firing than flying wild evasion patterns.
"-I see three symps on the roof armed with Pilum AVRs-" a Roland driver. "We're hit. We're hit. Drivetrain damage confirmed."
"P-8. Covering R-12. Engaging. Hostile Unaugmented Infantry. Viral Rounds. P-8. Kill Confirmed." A X-PROG 311 on the tactical networks.
"Enemy strongpoint clear, second wave is to advance."
"They're bringing up reinforcements from underground!"
"TRIDENT-4 has sensor link on enemy reinforcements. Locked targets. Lancing."
"Hana is hit, got tagged with one of those heavy plasma cannon. Repeat, our HITMark is CI."
In a fit of absurd hysteria, Henriette realizes that she's going to have to file a report again regarding how she's lost or damaged beyond recognition yet another billion-dollar superweapon. Or maybe she can get Jamelia to get Donald to do it. Then she starts to breathe, and clamps it down. That's not a worry. She was facing down a high-end armored vehicle with ground-to-orbit capability. Expending an ARC II to achieve that goal is a trade no Technocrat is going to be able to second-guess. And this time she won't be required to answer to Command itself as to what happened regarding their biomechanical superweapon that cost more to build than any single nation's annual GDP.
Henriette flips through the tactical channels as she gets her bearings, carefully climbing out of the ARC II's cockpit and back into the building through a shattered window. She recognizes it as one of the RIKEN facilities, a Japanese research laboratory. Chemical research, it seems, looking at the facility itself. Fortunately. She wouldn't know what to do if she had run into the BSL-4 lab there. She runs comms programs in her ADEI, tapping into the encrypted tactical channels and using the camera feeds of Damage Control constables and HITMarks to check her immediate situation, like Harlan reminded her.
"Knowledge itself is power." He had said, in his usual smug asshole tone. "The reason we were so good at taking out enemy cultists was not because we could outfight entire squads of them. They'd just send two squads. It was because we could find them, and make sure that they couldn't get the second and third squads in before we killed the first one." As she does so, she lets muscle memory and training kick in-not as precise as ADEI tactical programs, but sufficient. She checks the Mjolnir Mark IV on her hip, pulling the magazine out and examining its ammunition, then reloading it and racking the slide. Her ADEI could have provided her the information, of course, and in the bottom right of her vision there's a little wireframe Mjolnir and an ammunition count, 10 rounds of HEAP and 5 spare magazines:
[10/10 I I I I I HEAP]
After all, just because Harlan insisted she learn the NWO way didn't mean she shouldn't use Iteration X programs. She signals to a nearby squad that she needs a pickup, and waits, covering the entrances. And she waits. She's not a foot soldier, she's not going to get into a fight without 20 tons of composites and high-tech weaponry surrounding her. Unfortunately Ling Clarent did not get that memo. She hits the Damage Control constables responding to her pickup request like a buzzsaw, pitting heavy augmentation and high-end tactical programs against skill and biotechnology. With superior reflexes and the supercomputers needed to push the smart pistol beyond its baseline performance, sympathizers in mass-produced combat endosymbiotes, armed with anti-bioweapon gear, and augmented with minor biotech are inadequate. She comes at Henriette, bloodied from glancing hits that pierced thinner dermal armor, but clearly not significantly slowed or inconvenienced. Henriette knows she has a few minutes at most.
Henriette notes that Ling's carrying a 'borrowed' mag rifle, which is good. The pilot interface battlesuit is designed to stop small arms fire and will survive multiple hits, even at close range. Meanwhile, Ling Clarent, in the form fitting sensor suit which is designed largely to minimize snags and do the bare minimum to protect the decency of a high-spec cyborg body, is not as armored. The old Excellion is designed tough to survive the G-stresses high-end Void Engineer and Iterator war machines can put it through. It's tough, not armored, and the Mjolnir is designed to kill things of its caliber. So long as she can get a shot off.
Which, Henriette, notes, given that Ling Clarent is clearly running some kind of super-commando skillsoft, might be hard. Even as she's thinking through this, she's pulling open the ARC and looking at what's left in the lab for potential tools. IEDs. Shock traps. All sorts of equipment that can slow or stop a full conversion body, even a lightweight pilot-class one. "This won't do." Henriette thinks. She needs an extra pair of hands if she wants to finish preparing the battlefield in time. And with that thought, she realizes what she can do. She's familiar with Ling Clarent's sensors, after all. And their limitations. Henriette sends a DNI message to the ARC II's fabbers, and is relieved when one of them responds positively.
Ling Clarent notices the hair-thin laser tripwire and the IEDs next to the door, and takes the opportunity to go through the wall instead. Her body isn't designed with quite the same specifications as a high-end combat chassis, but it is strong enough to stay standing and operational at high Gs, and tough enough to withstand small arms fire. Walls to her are inconvenient, but can be bypassed. The ghost of the Shock Corps tactical knowledge in her mind guides her movements, tells her that going through doors is suicidal, that she should breach walls when possible.
The flashbang and corrosive gas bomb are an unpleasant surprise, telling her that Henriette has anticipated this path. But she is a combat cyborg, and her eyes rapidly adapt to the blinding glare, while her body fends off the corrosive gas with little more than superficial burns. She discards her ruined weapon, and decides that close combat is necessary. Henriette Langley is across the room, in light powered armor designed for SERE use and to act as an external prosthetic. Langley is unarmed,and Ling knows that Langley is only lightly augmented. Henriette was humanized after Autochthonia, Ling notes. And that observation makes her happy. She didn't deserve to be given such a gift. She was too irrational for such a gift.
"Ling." Henriette shouts. "You don't have to do this."
"Yes I do!" She exclaims. "You're a traitor and a reality deviant."
"Am I?" Henriette asks. "Use that logical mind of yours and think of what's happening. Look outside for a moment!" Henriette exclaims. "If we were the traitors, how would we have the resources to pull this off?! This is most of Damage Control. Right there. And whatever they could beg and borrow from Ragnarok Command. And a fair share of Iterators who owe them favors after that incident last year in Britain. Did the entire Technocratic Union turn traitor except for your little corner of the world? What's your endgame, anyways? If you somehow miraculously defeat this attack that just means that Ragnarok Command comes in and brings in even heavier equipment, or you get killed by cyborg assassins in your sleep."
"You, a traitor, wouldn't understand." Ling charges Henriette, and is surprised by the improvised concussive mines hidden and strewn across the laboratory. A brief flash and a crushing force throw her back. "Lethal force? How hypocritical."
"I know your specifications." Henriette says acidly. "Something like that wouldn't kill you. You're really, really bad at this, by the way. Manipulating people."
"Shut up!" Ling cries, as she follows Henriette through the gauntlet of traps. Concussion bombs stagger her. Flashbangs and improvised HERF emitters mean that her eyes are fuzzy with static. "You're a traitor and you're trying to ask me to forgive you and-" she stops, not knowing what to say. The feeling inside her chest is even worse now. It feels like a nuclear meltdown. But her reactor is fine. "-why are you doing this? Do you think I'm pitiful or something?" The words come out unbidden.
"What is wrong with you?" Henriette asks.
"Nothing is wrong with me. And you've run out of room to retreat." Ling shouts, coming to her feet from the last concussion mine. Henriette takes advantage of that opportunity, enabling the armor's myomer boosters and slamming Ling through a wall, pinning her.
"We don't need to be trying to kill each other. At all." Henriette tries again, trying to hold Ling down. Even with the boosted strength of the armor, it's hard going. "You have the opportunity for a second chance here. People are well aware that you're an emoneut. You were fed bad orders, and you obeyed them to the best of your ability. You don't have to die here."
"Thank you for noticing that I am obeying orders. Valid orders. Unlike you. And I'm not the one dying here." Ling says. She overclocks her musculature, pushing it to the absolute edge of what her skeleton can handle, and forces Henriette's hands off with strength enough to crumple armor plate. Her HUD informs her that microfine stress fractures have developed in the graphene bones, and she is tearing her body's musculature apart. She does not care. Killing Henriette is the objective. All other objectives are secondary. Henriette goes flying, and Ling follows, straddling Henriette's prone form before she can get up.
The impact of her slight fists onto the armor is as regular as a metronome, and the armor starts to fail, even as Henriette desperately struggles to push Ling off. Fist-sized dent after fist-sized dent crumple the armor. Ling ignores the stress warnings telling her that her skeletal structure is taking damage, that she is fracturing the carbon-composite bones in her hand, tearing the synthetic muscle, overstressing ligaments and joints, and keeps pounding at the hard armored suit. Eventually, she causes enough damage, and the armor itself goes limp.
Ling brings her hands down on Henriette's pinned, unmoving form one last time, and tears the helmet from the suit's shoulders. Something dark and heavy drops out with a clanking sound. Ling Clarent is surprised when it looks black and dry and solid, just like an Iteration X multipurpose minibomb, and sends a command to immediately overcharge all her defenses, using maximum power from her Prime Energy batteries. "I'm sorry it had to be this way." Henriette says, her voice remotely transmitted to the armor, and Ling Clarent is engulfed in an explosion which blows out every single window on the floor.
Several rooms and floors away, Henriette sighs, and thanks whoever designed the undersuit to be made of programmable materials. Improvising a chromatophore cloak out of nothing but what she was wearing and a bunch of wrecked ARC components was not easy. Sneaking out of the lethal radius of an entire pilot suit stuffed full of high-explosives was even harder. She wipes the uncomfortable programmable matter from the ARC II's self-repair reservoirs from her face. It was never designed to work as active camouflage, even if it could change shape and color. Combined with the harness she wears from some of the ARC II's stealth systems, and she was able to sneak away while Ling was distracted by the empty suit with a ghost in it. Harlan had taught her that trick, mentioned offhandedly that he had booby-trapped an Alanson a few times in a similar way. Henriette wipes sweat from her face-yes, sweat, no tears at all-and admits that she regrets slightly that this was the only way. Someone trained up to veteran infantry standards in a power armored suit and with minor cybernetic augs wasn't going to win against a high-end cyborg running a supersoldier program. Perhaps if there had been another way. Ling deserved that much, at least.
"This is Lieutenant Langley repeating a request for pickup." Henriette starts. "One hostile aug has attempted to engage me and has been neutraliz-"
Ling Clarent charges out of the inferno, protected from the blast by an impenetrable inertial field, powerful enough that it bends even light. "Well, fuck." Henriette manages. Desperate and with only lethal force left, she fires the Mjolnir. Better Ling than her. She manages to fire three times before Ling gets into range and slaps the weapon out of her hand. The first two shots deflects off the fading inertial field, and the third hits her in the side, sending her staggering-but Henriette knows that a Excellion-class body can take a surprising amount of punishment, and Ling Clarent can live without two of her four kidneys and her secondary neurachem pump.
Unarmored, Henriette does the only thing she can think of. She upgrades her extraction request beacon to a full distress call as she dodges Ling Clarent, and hopes against hope that whatever Ling wants to do, it's going to be slow and painful. Because if she was the emoneut Henriette remembered, nothing will save her. And after being threatened with eternal torture in your robo-god-vampire-sister's hell realm, normal pain seems almost quaint.
"A remote drone." Ling says. "I considered that a possibility. Unfortunately, you no longer have your best assets."
Dramatic Irony: So it turns out that Henriette is now the one pleading to save the life of her former enemy, which is something that is probably unthinkable but she seems to actually do that a lot. She gave Henrietta a second chance, and now perhaps Ling might get one as well. It's interesting that Henriette is often more merciful than a lot of the 'nicer' characters to her enemies, isn't it? How is she going to try to convince a warrior-god to spare an enemy's life?
[ ] Pragmatic: Ling Clarent is an asset. She is very good at following orders, and furthermore is an emoneut. People say and do things around emoneuts because they follow orders well. And these things are good military intelligence.
[ ] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[ ] Authoritative: Henriette was the linchpin in murdering an atomic-powered battle fortress on legs. Piero should listen to her perfectly reasonable request. It's not like a crippled cyborg is much of a threat at this point.
[ ] Resigned: "Never mind. She's not relevant."
[ ] Write-In
Breach Point: What is Piero's primary breach point and why?
[ ] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
[ ] The Reactor Cooling Vents: Who the fuck booby-traps a reactor cooling vent? It's not like someone's going to be crazy enough to station a mutant war dragon in the reactor room itself, right? Sure, it means Piero and Rose and a handful of DC heavies are the only forces who can go through this way-but all they need to do is get in, deactivate internal defenses, and let everyone else in.
[ ] The Test Facility: The test facility system is heavily defended and reinforced. In a way which is designed to keep test subjects in, not keep demigods out. It's a crazy idea, but it's not as tactically insane as it sounds, especially because they couldn't have changed the override codes before this assault.
[ ] Write In
"Pilot Langley," Ling sends by DNI. She finds it much easier than speaking normally, but most people can't handle communicating this way. It'd take them many, many seconds to talk like this - but here and now both of them are plugged into high end war machines and are thinking faster than baseline humans can.
"Pilot Clarent," she gets back, a familiar 'voice' in her mind. "I'm surprised. You're handling yourself differently."
"Yours is not." She can't track down precisely where the signal is coming from - but then again, she's shielded herself too. The damage to her mimetic camo is heavy too, so she's not got as much to lose. "You're still overconfident. And an inferior Iterator. And a deviant individual. And-"
"I'm sorry."
The words strike Ling like a kinetic impactor. She doesn't have a response. Because she's focusing on her weapons management and trying to track down Henriette, of course.
"No, really, I am." A sigh - a false vocalization injected into a DNI-to-DNI conversation. "I was a pretty awful person as a teenager. I went after you because you were a threat to... to what I wanted. Because you'd sometimes beat me in sims. And I am sorry for that. Since we last met, I've had to grow up a lot. Basically, I was kind of a bitch to you. So I have a lot of things to say sorry for."
"Your apologies mean nothing." Ling deploys a high power ground penetrating radar to hunt for the annoying voice. She just needs to keep her distracted, until she shoots her down in flames.
"I talked quite a lot with Major Jane Clarent. Before this current thing, I mean. I didn't know what it meant to be a Clarent before. I thought it was just a surname. And then I talked more with her after she realized what the traitor Gregor was up to."
"Stop attempting psychological warfare on me."
"No, that's the truth." Henriette pauses. "It makes sense why they'd pick you for their little attempted coup. You believe what you're told. You don't ask inconvenient questions. Here - have the actual facts on the ground."
Ling immediately purges the file squirt. She's not an idiot to open an EM-warfare package like that.
"Urgh, you didn't even read it, did you? Well, long story short, we're the ones directly following Command's orders. You've been tricked by a corrupt Progenitor into supporting a coup against the Technocratic Union. And I don't blame you." There's a soft chuckle. "You don't have a disloyal bone in your body. And you're much younger than Jane and haven't learned to overcome what they did to you, like she has."
Ling's stomach feels hot. Not the kind of hot it feels around Sanjeet. The kind of hot it feels around Yinzheng Li. In fact, Henriette Langley is sounding wrong. Wrong-wrong-wrong! She's too soft. She sounds almost kind. Henriette doesn't sound soft. She's never kind. She's spiky and unkind. Is that even her, rather than some drone imitating her? But no, it's handling just like her.
Which is to say, really annoyingly.
"I don't want to have to hurt you," Henriette's voice says. "You're just following orders. If you power down your unit, you won't be sanctioned for this. And if it helps, I'll also let you slap me a few times. I deserve it."
"You can't make me turn traitor just by promising to let me slap you." Without asking, Ling's brain provides the mental image of her bringing her hand into Henriette's face. It does feel... good.
"Would punches do instead?"
"You're making fun of me!" It comes out as an exclamation rather than a flat statement.
"Look, I'm trying to say sorry to someone who's literally betraying the Union right now." Henriette appears to have reached the end of her infamously short amounts of patience. "I'm trying to give you a chance. A chance you deserve because I know more about what happened to you Clarents than I did when I was a bitchy teenager. Are you going to power down or not?"
Ling responds, not with words, but with the weapons systems of her vehicle. She doesn't need a chance from Henriette. She's working for Control. Control loves her. She knows that they are the enemies of Control. Control hates them. So she hates them too. They must be destroyed. For who is she, to question a god? She tracks the holoechoes, and opens fire with everything she has. Flechettes, explosive shells, plasma lances and missiles slice through the air, but find only decoys and deceptions. The cloud of perfect duplicate ARC-II echoes converges again for a moment, then splits apart into yet another swarm. Ling accepts that by concentrating all weapons on Henriette, she is allowing the other ARC Is and IIs to avoid damage, which is a long-term threat to the survival of her allies. But it is necessary for mission completion that she do so. Henriette Langley, Ling considers, is significant enough that all her attentions must be focused on her.
When Henriette responds with inferno gel, Ling doesn't bother to evade. The temperature readouts of her war machine spike from the blue-hot flames of the incendiary munitions, but Ling is aware of the specifications of the AAMV-1998. It is designed to survive charging through a still-rising mushroom cloud, its cockpit and systems shielded by solid-state cooling against the heat. Ling considers for a moment why she would be targeted by the inferno gel-a powerful weapon against most infantry and vehicles-and in her distraction, realizes that they are intended to cover for heavier weapons a heartbeat too late. She takes a multi-dozen G jump with the spidertank's powerful legs and gravitics, but too late, as the HVMs follow her evasive maneuver and pierce her war machine's hull.
The first HVM hits near one of the heavy machinegun turrets on the sides and rear of the spidertank. The outer hull is thinner there, weakened by the 15-millimeter machinegun's presence. The warhead penetrates, a white-hot lance of starfire cooking off the caseless machinegun ammunition and cutting into vital systems. Ling notices the brief pause in functionality as damaged components are bypassed and self-repair initiates. Minor damage, a handful of primary sensor feeds cut and information being temporarily fed through secondary sensors, the advanced-but-still-mundane machinegun turret and its cheaper alloy armor turned into slag. She notes that it reduces the multiped's ability to cover against infantry assault, which might be a long-term concern as it is clear that the enemy is gaining an advantage. The second hits thicker armor, missing its targeted impact point because of her jump, and the HVM only punches through the outer armor, its force dispersed by the inner nanocomposite long before it penetrates to the mass storage and the core internal armoring. The wound immediately begins to heal. Ling confirms that her war machine's mass intake systems are still working, and that it is still fabricating replacement armor, systems, and missiles to replace the ones she has expended.
The AAMV-1998 has additional ordinance capability, but it is only mundane. The antipersonnel blisters lack the range to hit Henriette's ARC II. And masses-built air to air missiles wouldn't work. Henriette's ARC II is invisible to their primitive seeker heads, as are the other Damage Control air units. So she relies on direct-fire weapons instead. Plasma lances, the multiped's heavy gatling cannon. She does not wish to risk her heaviest weapon until she can get a confirmed kill shot. Meanwhile, the other Damage Control airborne units harass her, their missiles exploding around her as they are deflected or spoofed or shot down. Most of the missiles the Progenitor-engineered militarized cephalopods and their ARCs carry are mundane. Hellfires, Vikhrs, and other missiles that are easily jammed or intercepted. But in their midst there are assassin's daggers hidden, Iteration X-built munitions with their own predatory intellects, using the swarms of mundane missiles as cover and distraction and sensors network all at once. The automated guns target the swarm, joining with the laser point defense and the airbursting fragmentation grenades to attempt hard-kills on the dangerous ones. It almost works. Another HVM smashes into a leg joint and temporarily disables the limb, the leg going rigid as she reallocates spare mass to self-repair the system. She evades, leaping away from the impact point, not wanting to risk a mobility kill or worse, not with the ORIONs around. Given enough time, they can force open the hatches on the multiped. And she's not entirely confident that the electrical discharge armor can defeat them in time.
And then her sensors see Henriette's ARC II screaming down at her in a 10-G death dive, in the narrow blindspot where her primary weapon cannot traverse. At the range it is closing to, even its ECM is insufficient to trick the multiped's advanced sensors, and she can see the real ARC II, highlighted conveniently for her. Ling twists the multiped in midair mid-jump, its weapon already tracking, as Henriette fires everything she has. Every single anti-armor smart missile the ARC II is armed with leaps into action, at a range so close that the multiped's point defense systems are overwhelmed. The plasma cannon and railgun of the ARC II fire, overcharged, and the AAMV-1998's armor protests against the impacts. She has a fraction of a second before the missiles impact as well, exploiting the still-healing, still-hot armor to pierce the nigh-invulnerable shell of the AAMV-1998 and score damage against internal systems. For her, that is more than long enough to make her decision. She could try to preserve her vehicle. It is a highly expensive, highly valuable asset. She should preserve it under normal circumstances.
But Control has ordered her to destroy the rogue forces. Control has told her that 100% materiel and personnel losses are acceptable so long as the enemy is defeated. And taking Henriette Langley down a peg makes her feel warm inside, the good kind of warm. At this range, Henriette cannot evade or defend either, and Ling has moved the ARC into the heavy railgun's line of fire. Ling fires first, plasma lances and gatling cannon and the heavy railgun. The ARC dies first, as a white-hot lance of superheated metal guts the VTOL and pierces the heavens. The shot is aimed perfectly, in line with the ARC's cockpit and fusion reactor-but somehow, Henriette has impossibly twisted the ARC just enough that the lance doesn't intersect the cockpit. Ling looks at the result of her work with disappointment-and a bare moment later, the hypervelocity missiles catch her, and then the railgun slugs do too, fired with just enough of a delay that they hit simultaneously, punching into already weakened armor from the plasma cannon hit. The micromissiles and mundane ones are just adding insult to injury. The gravitic fields around the AAMV-1998 destabilize as one of the HVMs stabs through the weakened armor and cores the main AG control computer. Ling activates the emergency eject immediately and is rocketed out at accelerations which would instantly kill a normal human being as the gravity drive of the AAMV-1998 fails and the vehicle implodes. There is no sense in spending her life at this point. Especially since Langley needs to be disabled.
She pulls the smart-pistol from the survival kit and moves towards the wreckage of the ARC, embedded into one of RIKEN's many lab buildings. Langley will be there.
***
Henriette comes to in hell. She doesn't believe in the Christian god, no. But even MIHT required some breadth of knowledge and some soft directives, and the scene she is observing is straight out of Dante Alleghiri's hell-or perhaps Revelations. Clouds of swarming insects seem to almost blot out the sun in distorted feeds from the ARC II's cameras. For a moment she's not sure why she's here, but then her ADEI reminds her fallible wet memory of the happenings of the last thirty seconds as the armor's medical systems start to fix her concussion.
She tried to take out the AAMV-1998 by destabilizing a gravitic engine. Risky, yes. Dangerous, often with terrifying consequences for the fabric of spacetime, yes. But against an invincible behemoth like that, paired with a pilot skilled enough at both combat and systems management that she couldn't exploit its weaknesses, it was her best shot. Perhaps, she thinks, she should have loaded some heavy antimateriel weapons, like a heavy railgun. Her attack went about as well as could be expected, but not quite as well as planned. Ling Clarent decided to try for a mutual kill, and very nearly managed exactly that. It took all her skill to turn what should have been a fatal shot for both pilot and vehicle into one which only killed the vehicle. In exchange, she cut her own war machine's survival chances to near zero. An inefficient trade, Henriette thinks. Something is wrong with Ling, she concludes.
She knows that the front half of the ARC has been embedded into one of the buildings on the RIKEN campus, and is currently protruding out of a research lab, the cockpit suspended in midair. Henriette pops the emergency escape system, the crumpled canopy ejecting on explosive bolts, and she sees parts of what was once a hyper-advanced VTOL scattered across much of the battlefield, and the warped, almost Lovecraftian mess that was once a high-end Iteration X multiped tank. She also sees that the battle is not over, but from what she understands from her tactical classes, they are winning. She sees a mutant thing that looks like a shaved shapeshifter get powerbombed through a ceiling by an ORION, while another one charges through plasma fire-disturbingly, Henriette notes, the ORION's flesh and armor melts from the hits but seems to grow back-and tears a snake-woman EDE in half. She can hear the chatter of Damage Control constables, the X-PROG 311 and ARC pilots, the armored vehicle commanders, and the voice of her own amalgam's participants-Rose and Jason-as they clear resistance. Without the AAMV-1998 and its bubble of death extending down to the horizon and up into low earth orbit, the air support and armored vehicles can spend more time firing than flying wild evasion patterns.
"-I see three symps on the roof armed with Pilum AVRs-" a Roland driver. "We're hit. We're hit. Drivetrain damage confirmed."
"P-8. Covering R-12. Engaging. Hostile Unaugmented Infantry. Viral Rounds. P-8. Kill Confirmed." A X-PROG 311 on the tactical networks.
"Enemy strongpoint clear, second wave is to advance."
"They're bringing up reinforcements from underground!"
"TRIDENT-4 has sensor link on enemy reinforcements. Locked targets. Lancing."
"Hana is hit, got tagged with one of those heavy plasma cannon. Repeat, our HITMark is CI."
In a fit of absurd hysteria, Henriette realizes that she's going to have to file a report again regarding how she's lost or damaged beyond recognition yet another billion-dollar superweapon. Or maybe she can get Jamelia to get Donald to do it. Then she starts to breathe, and clamps it down. That's not a worry. She was facing down a high-end armored vehicle with ground-to-orbit capability. Expending an ARC II to achieve that goal is a trade no Technocrat is going to be able to second-guess. And this time she won't be required to answer to Command itself as to what happened regarding their biomechanical superweapon that cost more to build than any single nation's annual GDP.
Henriette flips through the tactical channels as she gets her bearings, carefully climbing out of the ARC II's cockpit and back into the building through a shattered window. She recognizes it as one of the RIKEN facilities, a Japanese research laboratory. Chemical research, it seems, looking at the facility itself. Fortunately. She wouldn't know what to do if she had run into the BSL-4 lab there. She runs comms programs in her ADEI, tapping into the encrypted tactical channels and using the camera feeds of Damage Control constables and HITMarks to check her immediate situation, like Harlan reminded her.
"Knowledge itself is power." He had said, in his usual smug asshole tone. "The reason we were so good at taking out enemy cultists was not because we could outfight entire squads of them. They'd just send two squads. It was because we could find them, and make sure that they couldn't get the second and third squads in before we killed the first one." As she does so, she lets muscle memory and training kick in-not as precise as ADEI tactical programs, but sufficient. She checks the Mjolnir Mark IV on her hip, pulling the magazine out and examining its ammunition, then reloading it and racking the slide. Her ADEI could have provided her the information, of course, and in the bottom right of her vision there's a little wireframe Mjolnir and an ammunition count, 10 rounds of HEAP and 5 spare magazines:
[10/10 I I I I I HEAP]
After all, just because Harlan insisted she learn the NWO way didn't mean she shouldn't use Iteration X programs. She signals to a nearby squad that she needs a pickup, and waits, covering the entrances. And she waits. She's not a foot soldier, she's not going to get into a fight without 20 tons of composites and high-tech weaponry surrounding her. Unfortunately Ling Clarent did not get that memo. She hits the Damage Control constables responding to her pickup request like a buzzsaw, pitting heavy augmentation and high-end tactical programs against skill and biotechnology. With superior reflexes and the supercomputers needed to push the smart pistol beyond its baseline performance, sympathizers in mass-produced combat endosymbiotes, armed with anti-bioweapon gear, and augmented with minor biotech are inadequate. She comes at Henriette, bloodied from glancing hits that pierced thinner dermal armor, but clearly not significantly slowed or inconvenienced. Henriette knows she has a few minutes at most.
Henriette notes that Ling's carrying a 'borrowed' mag rifle, which is good. The pilot interface battlesuit is designed to stop small arms fire and will survive multiple hits, even at close range. Meanwhile, Ling Clarent, in the form fitting sensor suit which is designed largely to minimize snags and do the bare minimum to protect the decency of a high-spec cyborg body, is not as armored. The old Excellion is designed tough to survive the G-stresses high-end Void Engineer and Iterator war machines can put it through. It's tough, not armored, and the Mjolnir is designed to kill things of its caliber. So long as she can get a shot off.
Which, Henriette, notes, given that Ling Clarent is clearly running some kind of super-commando skillsoft, might be hard. Even as she's thinking through this, she's pulling open the ARC and looking at what's left in the lab for potential tools. IEDs. Shock traps. All sorts of equipment that can slow or stop a full conversion body, even a lightweight pilot-class one. "This won't do." Henriette thinks. She needs an extra pair of hands if she wants to finish preparing the battlefield in time. And with that thought, she realizes what she can do. She's familiar with Ling Clarent's sensors, after all. And their limitations. Henriette sends a DNI message to the ARC II's fabbers, and is relieved when one of them responds positively.
Ling Clarent notices the hair-thin laser tripwire and the IEDs next to the door, and takes the opportunity to go through the wall instead. Her body isn't designed with quite the same specifications as a high-end combat chassis, but it is strong enough to stay standing and operational at high Gs, and tough enough to withstand small arms fire. Walls to her are inconvenient, but can be bypassed. The ghost of the Shock Corps tactical knowledge in her mind guides her movements, tells her that going through doors is suicidal, that she should breach walls when possible.
The flashbang and corrosive gas bomb are an unpleasant surprise, telling her that Henriette has anticipated this path. But she is a combat cyborg, and her eyes rapidly adapt to the blinding glare, while her body fends off the corrosive gas with little more than superficial burns. She discards her ruined weapon, and decides that close combat is necessary. Henriette Langley is across the room, in light powered armor designed for SERE use and to act as an external prosthetic. Langley is unarmed,and Ling knows that Langley is only lightly augmented. Henriette was humanized after Autochthonia, Ling notes. And that observation makes her happy. She didn't deserve to be given such a gift. She was too irrational for such a gift.
"Ling." Henriette shouts. "You don't have to do this."
"Yes I do!" She exclaims. "You're a traitor and a reality deviant."
"Am I?" Henriette asks. "Use that logical mind of yours and think of what's happening. Look outside for a moment!" Henriette exclaims. "If we were the traitors, how would we have the resources to pull this off?! This is most of Damage Control. Right there. And whatever they could beg and borrow from Ragnarok Command. And a fair share of Iterators who owe them favors after that incident last year in Britain. Did the entire Technocratic Union turn traitor except for your little corner of the world? What's your endgame, anyways? If you somehow miraculously defeat this attack that just means that Ragnarok Command comes in and brings in even heavier equipment, or you get killed by cyborg assassins in your sleep."
"You, a traitor, wouldn't understand." Ling charges Henriette, and is surprised by the improvised concussive mines hidden and strewn across the laboratory. A brief flash and a crushing force throw her back. "Lethal force? How hypocritical."
"I know your specifications." Henriette says acidly. "Something like that wouldn't kill you. You're really, really bad at this, by the way. Manipulating people."
"Shut up!" Ling cries, as she follows Henriette through the gauntlet of traps. Concussion bombs stagger her. Flashbangs and improvised HERF emitters mean that her eyes are fuzzy with static. "You're a traitor and you're trying to ask me to forgive you and-" she stops, not knowing what to say. The feeling inside her chest is even worse now. It feels like a nuclear meltdown. But her reactor is fine. "-why are you doing this? Do you think I'm pitiful or something?" The words come out unbidden.
"What is wrong with you?" Henriette asks.
"Nothing is wrong with me. And you've run out of room to retreat." Ling shouts, coming to her feet from the last concussion mine. Henriette takes advantage of that opportunity, enabling the armor's myomer boosters and slamming Ling through a wall, pinning her.
"We don't need to be trying to kill each other. At all." Henriette tries again, trying to hold Ling down. Even with the boosted strength of the armor, it's hard going. "You have the opportunity for a second chance here. People are well aware that you're an emoneut. You were fed bad orders, and you obeyed them to the best of your ability. You don't have to die here."
"Thank you for noticing that I am obeying orders. Valid orders. Unlike you. And I'm not the one dying here." Ling says. She overclocks her musculature, pushing it to the absolute edge of what her skeleton can handle, and forces Henriette's hands off with strength enough to crumple armor plate. Her HUD informs her that microfine stress fractures have developed in the graphene bones, and she is tearing her body's musculature apart. She does not care. Killing Henriette is the objective. All other objectives are secondary. Henriette goes flying, and Ling follows, straddling Henriette's prone form before she can get up.
The impact of her slight fists onto the armor is as regular as a metronome, and the armor starts to fail, even as Henriette desperately struggles to push Ling off. Fist-sized dent after fist-sized dent crumple the armor. Ling ignores the stress warnings telling her that her skeletal structure is taking damage, that she is fracturing the carbon-composite bones in her hand, tearing the synthetic muscle, overstressing ligaments and joints, and keeps pounding at the hard armored suit. Eventually, she causes enough damage, and the armor itself goes limp.
Ling brings her hands down on Henriette's pinned, unmoving form one last time, and tears the helmet from the suit's shoulders. Something dark and heavy drops out with a clanking sound. Ling Clarent is surprised when it looks black and dry and solid, just like an Iteration X multipurpose minibomb, and sends a command to immediately overcharge all her defenses, using maximum power from her Prime Energy batteries. "I'm sorry it had to be this way." Henriette says, her voice remotely transmitted to the armor, and Ling Clarent is engulfed in an explosion which blows out every single window on the floor.
Several rooms and floors away, Henriette sighs, and thanks whoever designed the undersuit to be made of programmable materials. Improvising a chromatophore cloak out of nothing but what she was wearing and a bunch of wrecked ARC components was not easy. Sneaking out of the lethal radius of an entire pilot suit stuffed full of high-explosives was even harder. She wipes the uncomfortable programmable matter from the ARC II's self-repair reservoirs from her face. It was never designed to work as active camouflage, even if it could change shape and color. Combined with the harness she wears from some of the ARC II's stealth systems, and she was able to sneak away while Ling was distracted by the empty suit with a ghost in it. Harlan had taught her that trick, mentioned offhandedly that he had booby-trapped an Alanson a few times in a similar way. Henriette wipes sweat from her face-yes, sweat, no tears at all-and admits that she regrets slightly that this was the only way. Someone trained up to veteran infantry standards in a power armored suit and with minor cybernetic augs wasn't going to win against a high-end cyborg running a supersoldier program. Perhaps if there had been another way. Ling deserved that much, at least.
"This is Lieutenant Langley repeating a request for pickup." Henriette starts. "One hostile aug has attempted to engage me and has been neutraliz-"
Ling Clarent charges out of the inferno, protected from the blast by an impenetrable inertial field, powerful enough that it bends even light. "Well, fuck." Henriette manages. Desperate and with only lethal force left, she fires the Mjolnir. Better Ling than her. She manages to fire three times before Ling gets into range and slaps the weapon out of her hand. The first two shots deflects off the fading inertial field, and the third hits her in the side, sending her staggering-but Henriette knows that a Excellion-class body can take a surprising amount of punishment, and Ling Clarent can live without two of her four kidneys and her secondary neurachem pump.
Unarmored, Henriette does the only thing she can think of. She upgrades her extraction request beacon to a full distress call as she dodges Ling Clarent, and hopes against hope that whatever Ling wants to do, it's going to be slow and painful. Because if she was the emoneut Henriette remembered, nothing will save her. And after being threatened with eternal torture in your robo-god-vampire-sister's hell realm, normal pain seems almost quaint.
"A remote drone." Ling says. "I considered that a possibility. Unfortunately, you no longer have your best assets."
***
Once, in these battlefields, all he would have felt was anger. His bloodlust was barely controlled in peace, but in war, it was all-consuming, it was what he was. It would be up to his AI minder and support staff to target him, a guided weapon of destruction targeted at the enemies of the Technocratic Union. But now, he is more controlled, and rather than being limited solely by the AI, he is aware in the battlefield, riding the edge of his rage and targeting his bloodlust. The tactical implants which had once been repurposed to run IFF and threat analysis programs intended for HITMarks now functioned at their full power, the supercomputers cradling his spine and infused right into the bone allowing him to simultaneously fight while giving multiple orders a second. He is now fulfilling his purpose. An exemplar. An icon, striding forwards invincible and untouchable, the Technocratic Union's terrible swift sword. And under his leadership, they are winning. The enemy has been caught out of position. His stratagem has worked. Soldiers intended to annihilate the Damage Control response, buy the ringleaders time to complete their nefarious deeds, are caught with the wrong equipment and piecemeal, desperately redeploying to fight an entirely different battle. Assets intended to annihilate the diversionary attack, to ensure that it could not be turned into a real attack, are caught unaware.
There is a brief flash lighting up the heavens, and Piero stands strong as the earth tears underneath him. He notices immediately through the squad-links that the cybertank is down, crushed into a crater of its own making, partially buried in a collapsed area of the RIKEN facility. The tank itself is warped and spaghettified, its body twisted and broken like an insect crushed by the hand of god. The forces there are so apocalyptic that the surroundings have turned to glass and the Primium of the tank has run, almost like liquid. Piero knows what happened. Gravitic system malfunction, combined with reactor meltdown. The highest-threat target on the surface has been destroyed. With the primary threat down, the secondaries are less dangerous. The remaining Damage Control vehicles advance, NATO-spec remote drones moving forward alongside the Rolands and other ground vehicles, sweeping away rogue sympathizers and militarized experiments with their railguns and missiles and machine-guns and cannon. With their UGVs depleted and the spidertank gone, he can put the vehicles to use fully, rather than screening them with infantry and stealth fields and moving them carefully to avoid revealing high-value targets to the spidertank.
He orders the general advance. And he leads the way, doing what he does best. The EDEs, the weaponized bears and big cats and guard dogs, the rogue Damage Control agents in light power armor-the things he faces do not fight him. He does not fight, for what he does is ad-hoc execution. He sprints through the overlapping fire of multiple defense turrets, ignoring the hits as they deflect off the armored attack symbiont he is wearing. Some penetrate, and deflect off skin, the most powerful of them leaving slight bruises. In return, his heavy Omnigun fires back in its anti-armor modes, annihilating enemies with high-powered particle beams or hypervelocity, quantum-tunneling rounds or microfusion swarmers or plasma bursts, or just up close and personal with the weapon's disruptor bayonet, cutting enemies in half. His armor, a biomechanical combination of Iteration X militarized hardtech and Progenitor militarized biotech, as much of a cyborg as he is, joins in, its predatory submind focusing on targets he finds too unimportant to care about, spitting 15-millimeter micromissiles at rogue JSDF or the facility's stable of hastily conscripted test subjects or lower-end EDEs. Sometimes he uses alternative weapons, primarily the blade strapped to his hip, its molecule-sharp edge enhanced by a nasty combination of a matter-disrupting field and self-regenerating explosive nanogel.
His bloody advance only pauses when he sees a distress beacon. The pilot of the ARC that had eliminated the cybertank has been pinned in a building, after ejection. If he had been operating under the protocols he had been in Moscow and prior operations, he would have ignored it. Low threat, minimal challenge. But now, he tempers the battle-lust with reason. His objective is to accomplish the mission, but preserve combat assets, and he can do the latter without compromising the former in this case. And he thinks that anyone who had managed to kill a cybertank of that level, one that had been pinning them down and making advance difficult and casualty-heavy deserves to live again. For the Union, and for glory. Finally, he understands that Rose knows the woman, and his batch-sister would probably be cross if her friend didn't survive the fight and could have. His tactical AI runs scenarios, estimated delays. Piero concludes he can probably delay ten seconds for this, and jumps, leaping right into and through the building.
Ling has Henriette pinned, crushing the life out of her slowly with powerful hands and joint cybermotors. She is smiling madly, but her rictus grin turns into a frown when one of the limbs shatters and goes loose, and she drops Henriette in shock. She turns immediately and sees Piero, surrounded by the shattering dust of a concrete wall, already aiming for a follow-up shot. Ling knows what Piero is. She knows what the EXEMPLAR can do. She knows about the molecularly-bonded armor of his skin, the EDE genetics infusing his tissues, the subdermal plates and internal dampening fields and nano-bred combat shielding. About his augmented nervous system that lets him dance through automatic weapons fire. About his immense, inhuman strength, sufficient to tear armored men in half without slowing, destroy a tank with bare hands, leap tall buildings in a single bound. About the Primium bones and internal organ shielding. But he is not, strictly speaking, immortal. Her body runs on a microfusion reactor. Get close enough, and she can injure or kill even a god. Once. [SAFETY SYSTEMS OVERRIDE], she sees displayed on her HUD. [CONFIRM SELF DESTRUCT]
LC2014.SHOCK.ITX.TU/KINGSLAYER, she tells her cyberbrain. [CONFIRM SAFETY OVERRIDE. MAXIMUM YIELD]
She shapes her internal fields, reconfigures them to draw from the self-destruct energy and channel it towards Piero, turning herself into a fractional-kiloton shaped-charge suicide bomb. She charges. She is a weaponized young woman, with a cybernetic body fast enough to dodge bullets and tough enough to resist all masses-tech small arms fire. She has combat programs downloaded to her ADEI giving her temporary proficiency in hand to hand combat and small arms. She is designed with superhuman reflexes to handle vehicles that no human can pilot. Her body is strong enough to move under high-G stress, capable of punching hard enough to kill in a single blow. She is moving in an evasion pattern that takes advantage of her implanted inertials, running and leaping a random-walk. She could be dropped, alone and naked, into a Masses special forces convention ready for her, and she would tear them apart. Against Piero Dominici, she might as well have been a 14-year-old girl for all her Iteration X augmentation assists her.
For Piero is not in an Excellion body. Piero is a weapon bred from a demigod, enhanced with technologies derived from the HITMark VI and the Avatar Slaying Enhancement, and unlike her, he carries a mythic thread, a powerful legend of his own. He reacts almost lazily. His fire control software locks on the intended targets, and he fires twice, one to remove a leg and stop her forward movement. The second shot tears out the microfusion reactor that serves as her body's heart, and Ling falls into low-power survival mode immediately.
"No." Henriette rasps, quietly, looking at her old rival-and a broken young woman-lying in a heap in front of her, missing an arm and a leg, with a hole in her chest which would be fatal for any normal human and a large percentage of combat cyborgs and constructs.
"No?" Piero asks. The word is unfamiliar to him. Not in the sense that he doesn't understand its meaning-for all that people think him an uneducated brute, he spends a lot of time in emotion-suppressed VR states, waiting for the next operation, learning or going through entertainment. But people do not say "no" to Piero Dominici, not without control overrides, or a hundred tons of composite armor and heavy weapons, and someone saying it is a novel experience.
There is a brief flash lighting up the heavens, and Piero stands strong as the earth tears underneath him. He notices immediately through the squad-links that the cybertank is down, crushed into a crater of its own making, partially buried in a collapsed area of the RIKEN facility. The tank itself is warped and spaghettified, its body twisted and broken like an insect crushed by the hand of god. The forces there are so apocalyptic that the surroundings have turned to glass and the Primium of the tank has run, almost like liquid. Piero knows what happened. Gravitic system malfunction, combined with reactor meltdown. The highest-threat target on the surface has been destroyed. With the primary threat down, the secondaries are less dangerous. The remaining Damage Control vehicles advance, NATO-spec remote drones moving forward alongside the Rolands and other ground vehicles, sweeping away rogue sympathizers and militarized experiments with their railguns and missiles and machine-guns and cannon. With their UGVs depleted and the spidertank gone, he can put the vehicles to use fully, rather than screening them with infantry and stealth fields and moving them carefully to avoid revealing high-value targets to the spidertank.
He orders the general advance. And he leads the way, doing what he does best. The EDEs, the weaponized bears and big cats and guard dogs, the rogue Damage Control agents in light power armor-the things he faces do not fight him. He does not fight, for what he does is ad-hoc execution. He sprints through the overlapping fire of multiple defense turrets, ignoring the hits as they deflect off the armored attack symbiont he is wearing. Some penetrate, and deflect off skin, the most powerful of them leaving slight bruises. In return, his heavy Omnigun fires back in its anti-armor modes, annihilating enemies with high-powered particle beams or hypervelocity, quantum-tunneling rounds or microfusion swarmers or plasma bursts, or just up close and personal with the weapon's disruptor bayonet, cutting enemies in half. His armor, a biomechanical combination of Iteration X militarized hardtech and Progenitor militarized biotech, as much of a cyborg as he is, joins in, its predatory submind focusing on targets he finds too unimportant to care about, spitting 15-millimeter micromissiles at rogue JSDF or the facility's stable of hastily conscripted test subjects or lower-end EDEs. Sometimes he uses alternative weapons, primarily the blade strapped to his hip, its molecule-sharp edge enhanced by a nasty combination of a matter-disrupting field and self-regenerating explosive nanogel.
His bloody advance only pauses when he sees a distress beacon. The pilot of the ARC that had eliminated the cybertank has been pinned in a building, after ejection. If he had been operating under the protocols he had been in Moscow and prior operations, he would have ignored it. Low threat, minimal challenge. But now, he tempers the battle-lust with reason. His objective is to accomplish the mission, but preserve combat assets, and he can do the latter without compromising the former in this case. And he thinks that anyone who had managed to kill a cybertank of that level, one that had been pinning them down and making advance difficult and casualty-heavy deserves to live again. For the Union, and for glory. Finally, he understands that Rose knows the woman, and his batch-sister would probably be cross if her friend didn't survive the fight and could have. His tactical AI runs scenarios, estimated delays. Piero concludes he can probably delay ten seconds for this, and jumps, leaping right into and through the building.
Ling has Henriette pinned, crushing the life out of her slowly with powerful hands and joint cybermotors. She is smiling madly, but her rictus grin turns into a frown when one of the limbs shatters and goes loose, and she drops Henriette in shock. She turns immediately and sees Piero, surrounded by the shattering dust of a concrete wall, already aiming for a follow-up shot. Ling knows what Piero is. She knows what the EXEMPLAR can do. She knows about the molecularly-bonded armor of his skin, the EDE genetics infusing his tissues, the subdermal plates and internal dampening fields and nano-bred combat shielding. About his augmented nervous system that lets him dance through automatic weapons fire. About his immense, inhuman strength, sufficient to tear armored men in half without slowing, destroy a tank with bare hands, leap tall buildings in a single bound. About the Primium bones and internal organ shielding. But he is not, strictly speaking, immortal. Her body runs on a microfusion reactor. Get close enough, and she can injure or kill even a god. Once. [SAFETY SYSTEMS OVERRIDE], she sees displayed on her HUD. [CONFIRM SELF DESTRUCT]
LC2014.SHOCK.ITX.TU/KINGSLAYER, she tells her cyberbrain. [CONFIRM SAFETY OVERRIDE. MAXIMUM YIELD]
She shapes her internal fields, reconfigures them to draw from the self-destruct energy and channel it towards Piero, turning herself into a fractional-kiloton shaped-charge suicide bomb. She charges. She is a weaponized young woman, with a cybernetic body fast enough to dodge bullets and tough enough to resist all masses-tech small arms fire. She has combat programs downloaded to her ADEI giving her temporary proficiency in hand to hand combat and small arms. She is designed with superhuman reflexes to handle vehicles that no human can pilot. Her body is strong enough to move under high-G stress, capable of punching hard enough to kill in a single blow. She is moving in an evasion pattern that takes advantage of her implanted inertials, running and leaping a random-walk. She could be dropped, alone and naked, into a Masses special forces convention ready for her, and she would tear them apart. Against Piero Dominici, she might as well have been a 14-year-old girl for all her Iteration X augmentation assists her.
For Piero is not in an Excellion body. Piero is a weapon bred from a demigod, enhanced with technologies derived from the HITMark VI and the Avatar Slaying Enhancement, and unlike her, he carries a mythic thread, a powerful legend of his own. He reacts almost lazily. His fire control software locks on the intended targets, and he fires twice, one to remove a leg and stop her forward movement. The second shot tears out the microfusion reactor that serves as her body's heart, and Ling falls into low-power survival mode immediately.
"No." Henriette rasps, quietly, looking at her old rival-and a broken young woman-lying in a heap in front of her, missing an arm and a leg, with a hole in her chest which would be fatal for any normal human and a large percentage of combat cyborgs and constructs.
"No?" Piero asks. The word is unfamiliar to him. Not in the sense that he doesn't understand its meaning-for all that people think him an uneducated brute, he spends a lot of time in emotion-suppressed VR states, waiting for the next operation, learning or going through entertainment. But people do not say "no" to Piero Dominici, not without control overrides, or a hundred tons of composite armor and heavy weapons, and someone saying it is a novel experience.
Dramatic Irony: So it turns out that Henriette is now the one pleading to save the life of her former enemy, which is something that is probably unthinkable but she seems to actually do that a lot. She gave Henrietta a second chance, and now perhaps Ling might get one as well. It's interesting that Henriette is often more merciful than a lot of the 'nicer' characters to her enemies, isn't it? How is she going to try to convince a warrior-god to spare an enemy's life?
[ ] Pragmatic: Ling Clarent is an asset. She is very good at following orders, and furthermore is an emoneut. People say and do things around emoneuts because they follow orders well. And these things are good military intelligence.
[ ] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[ ] Authoritative: Henriette was the linchpin in murdering an atomic-powered battle fortress on legs. Piero should listen to her perfectly reasonable request. It's not like a crippled cyborg is much of a threat at this point.
[ ] Resigned: "Never mind. She's not relevant."
[ ] Write-In
Breach Point: What is Piero's primary breach point and why?
[ ] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
[ ] The Reactor Cooling Vents: Who the fuck booby-traps a reactor cooling vent? It's not like someone's going to be crazy enough to station a mutant war dragon in the reactor room itself, right? Sure, it means Piero and Rose and a handful of DC heavies are the only forces who can go through this way-but all they need to do is get in, deactivate internal defenses, and let everyone else in.
[ ] The Test Facility: The test facility system is heavily defended and reinforced. In a way which is designed to keep test subjects in, not keep demigods out. It's a crazy idea, but it's not as tactically insane as it sounds, especially because they couldn't have changed the override codes before this assault.
[ ] Write In
- Location
- in the trash
We may have to consider getting Henriette better augmentation.
...That was Serafina, not Henriette.
[X] Pragmatic: Ling Clarent is an asset. She is very good at following orders, and furthermore is an emoneut. People say and do things around emoneuts because they follow orders well. And these things are good military intelligence.
Piero's still pretty bloodthirsty, even if he's gotten better at suppressing it. Let's go with this.
[-] The Reactor Cooling Vents: Who the fuck booby-traps a reactor cooling vent? It's not like someone's going to be crazy enough to station a mutant war dragon in the reactor room itself, right? Sure, it means Piero and Rose and a handful of DC heavies are the only forces who can go through this way-but all they need to do is get in, deactivate internal defenses, and let everyone else in.
XCOM style base assault mission let's do this.
EDIT: Actually, holding off on the second vote for a bit.
...That was Serafina, not Henriette.
[X] Pragmatic: Ling Clarent is an asset. She is very good at following orders, and furthermore is an emoneut. People say and do things around emoneuts because they follow orders well. And these things are good military intelligence.
Piero's still pretty bloodthirsty, even if he's gotten better at suppressing it. Let's go with this.
XCOM style base assault mission let's do this.
EDIT: Actually, holding off on the second vote for a bit.
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Nah, she means Henrietta, in space, not Mari.
Henrietta didn't take the second chance tho
pt246
Sometimes sarcastic, occasionally grumpy
Idealistic doesn't seem likely to work on Piero, and Authoritative sure as hell isn't going to.
Breach Point seems like both a stylistic and tactical choice--a trade-off of what we want to fight (masses of enemies with lots of reinforcements, a dragon, and crazed experiments) against what we accomplish by fighting it. So for now I'm going to vote:
but I'm certainly open to arguments for the other options.
Edit: Vote changed
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- Location
- in the trash
Nah, she means Henrietta, in space, not Mari.
Henrietta didn't take the second chance tho
We can probably assume that Jamelia was only able to achieve her track record of defections after she lost the tsundere personality.
- Location
- Germiston, South Africa
[X] Pragmatic: Ling Clarent is an asset. She is very good at following orders, and furthermore is an emoneut. People say and do things around emoneuts because they follow orders well. And these things are good military intelligence.
[X] The Reactor Cooling Vents: Who the fuck booby-traps a reactor cooling vent? It's not like someone's going to be crazy enough to station a mutant war dragon in the reactor room itself, right? Sure, it means Piero and Rose and a handful of DC heavies are the only forces who can go through this way-but all they need to do is get in, deactivate internal defenses, and let everyone else in.
I'm always up for the specfor punching through and disabling defenses.
[X] The Reactor Cooling Vents: Who the fuck booby-traps a reactor cooling vent? It's not like someone's going to be crazy enough to station a mutant war dragon in the reactor room itself, right? Sure, it means Piero and Rose and a handful of DC heavies are the only forces who can go through this way-but all they need to do is get in, deactivate internal defenses, and let everyone else in.
I'm always up for the specfor punching through and disabling defenses.
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
I think I have some art for this:
This one is closer, though:
"I swear, I'm not doing it on purpose!"
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
We're not going to order Piero, the ground force commander, to spare her. And even the Hero of Moscow trying to give orders to a EXEMPLAR living legend is not a good idea.
We've had it repeatedly demonstrated that Piero is not just a two-legged WMD murder-machine. He's an EXEMPLAR, a living archetype of a supreme warrior and battlefield commander. He'll understand this:
"No. Do not kill her. She doesn't need nor deserve to die. She's been lied to and used and turned into a mindless weapon aimed at the people she was meant to protect and serve as a warrior. Sound familiar? I unintentionally contributed to her hate and isolation in the past, by being a bitch for petty reasons that seemed worthwhile at the time. I was wrong. So I want to make it up to her, save her from being erased as a dead traitor, and even return some assets to the Union.
But most of all, I want to apologize to her. She didn't deserve what I did to her, or what Control did. And I'm not the kind of person anymore who would do it. So I'm going to apologize, take apart her hate, and set her free of it. Yes, some part of me will get some satisfaction out of making her angry by taking away her perfectly good reasons to be angry with me, but I'll try not to rub it in. You've been used against the Union by these... pretenders to Control, they used my sister, they used Ling, and they tried to do the same to me on Autocthonia. I'm striking back at them this way, and making up for my past.
I'm not going to kill her. I'm going to defeat her. Gregor, false Control, and their cause... Everyone who lied to her and used her. I'm going to take her apart with an apology. Sanjeet forgave me. Can I do any less?"
Henriette began as a broken person, who had spent the time she knew Ling being sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes deliberately, but always a hurtful bitch to Ling, for being a rival Pilot, rival love option to Sanjeet, and likely creeping Henriette out for being an emoneut. Now that Henriette has had a taste of needing to have her emotions damped in the wake of her trauma, she can sympathize. At the same time, more practically, she knows that her sincerely apologizing for having been a bitch unsettles and enrages Ling (because it takes away that satisfying justification to HAAAATE her), so she'll use that, thereby pleasing both her internal Competitor/Critic, and her lingering urge to still be a bitch to the skank who tried to take her not-my-boyfriend.
Ling, in contrast, is coming unglued, increasingly feasting on the delicious, delicious HATE and RAGE as it bleeds through her neutralizing, conditioning, and pain. She's all of Henriette's past sins and casual cruelties come back to haunt her, so every insult she'll throw at Henriette is something perfectly true or accurate from the past of pre-Autocthonia Henriette, all the times she was catty, shallow, hurtful, and generally the worst person she could be to Ling, just because she could be. Ling might start off controlled, her insults and such more focused on Henriette's 'betrayal' of Control, but they will shift more and more person as Ling's control slips, and every last bit of awful Henriette was to her gets returned in full karma.
This is Henriette's swan song, so we want it to be a summation of all the development she's had since starting as a twitchy, traumatized wreck to the more mature and skilled woman we have now. She's faced her traumas with Moscow, accepted her past sins with Henrietta, and learned to open up again with Mari and Rose. She's paid in blood for every step, and now also has the burden of knowing just what the stakes are vis a vis Control, the Computer, and Threat Null. Ling has extremely good and fully justified reasons to hate her and what she's done in the past, and probably 100% honestly believes Henriette is a traitor to Control and the Union right now. Conversely, Henriette knows Ling is justified in her hate, and can't even hate her back anymore, acknowledging both her past transgressions and the fact Ling is being manipulated by Control, which tried the same to her with the faces of her parents.
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
I want to see Rose and Piero having a huge charge and fight among the vehicles and everything else in there. Plus, the reactor vent smells like asking for trouble with the small force cap, and the test chambers might get us stuck dealing with GlaDOS.
This one is closer, though:
Henriette has a terrible habit of driving her one-on-one opponents into fits of utterly homicidal fury. She just managed to do it to an emoneut!
"I swear, I'm not doing it on purpose!"
Boy, you destroy one DSS mega-mecha in combat saving the world, and people never stop making you do paperwork for it...
Behold the power of Bob Ross and his happy trees!
Not really. She's a Pilot, not a footsoldier. She's not supposed to be doing this sort of stuff. That's Rose and Kessler's lane. Also... this is her last hurrah. She's met her past and defeated the girl who was once her rival, and in doing so has evolved past her and the bitch she once was. I think Henriette is pretty much done here.
Henriette gave her sister a second chance too, in space. It...um... didn't quite go as intended.
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
We're not going to order Piero, the ground force commander, to spare her. And even the Hero of Moscow trying to give orders to a EXEMPLAR living legend is not a good idea.
We've had it repeatedly demonstrated that Piero is not just a two-legged WMD murder-machine. He's an EXEMPLAR, a living archetype of a supreme warrior and battlefield commander. He'll understand this:
"No. Do not kill her. She doesn't need nor deserve to die. She's been lied to and used and turned into a mindless weapon aimed at the people she was meant to protect and serve as a warrior. Sound familiar? I unintentionally contributed to her hate and isolation in the past, by being a bitch for petty reasons that seemed worthwhile at the time. I was wrong. So I want to make it up to her, save her from being erased as a dead traitor, and even return some assets to the Union.
But most of all, I want to apologize to her. She didn't deserve what I did to her, or what Control did. And I'm not the kind of person anymore who would do it. So I'm going to apologize, take apart her hate, and set her free of it. Yes, some part of me will get some satisfaction out of making her angry by taking away her perfectly good reasons to be angry with me, but I'll try not to rub it in. You've been used against the Union by these... pretenders to Control, they used my sister, they used Ling, and they tried to do the same to me on Autocthonia. I'm striking back at them this way, and making up for my past.
I'm not going to kill her. I'm going to defeat her. Gregor, false Control, and their cause... Everyone who lied to her and used her. I'm going to take her apart with an apology. Sanjeet forgave me. Can I do any less?"
Henriette began as a broken person, who had spent the time she knew Ling being sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes deliberately, but always a hurtful bitch to Ling, for being a rival Pilot, rival love option to Sanjeet, and likely creeping Henriette out for being an emoneut. Now that Henriette has had a taste of needing to have her emotions damped in the wake of her trauma, she can sympathize. At the same time, more practically, she knows that her sincerely apologizing for having been a bitch unsettles and enrages Ling (because it takes away that satisfying justification to HAAAATE her), so she'll use that, thereby pleasing both her internal Competitor/Critic, and her lingering urge to still be a bitch to the skank who tried to take her not-my-boyfriend.
Ling, in contrast, is coming unglued, increasingly feasting on the delicious, delicious HATE and RAGE as it bleeds through her neutralizing, conditioning, and pain. She's all of Henriette's past sins and casual cruelties come back to haunt her, so every insult she'll throw at Henriette is something perfectly true or accurate from the past of pre-Autocthonia Henriette, all the times she was catty, shallow, hurtful, and generally the worst person she could be to Ling, just because she could be. Ling might start off controlled, her insults and such more focused on Henriette's 'betrayal' of Control, but they will shift more and more person as Ling's control slips, and every last bit of awful Henriette was to her gets returned in full karma.
This is Henriette's swan song, so we want it to be a summation of all the development she's had since starting as a twitchy, traumatized wreck to the more mature and skilled woman we have now. She's faced her traumas with Moscow, accepted her past sins with Henrietta, and learned to open up again with Mari and Rose. She's paid in blood for every step, and now also has the burden of knowing just what the stakes are vis a vis Control, the Computer, and Threat Null. Ling has extremely good and fully justified reasons to hate her and what she's done in the past, and probably 100% honestly believes Henriette is a traitor to Control and the Union right now. Conversely, Henriette knows Ling is justified in her hate, and can't even hate her back anymore, acknowledging both her past transgressions and the fact Ling is being manipulated by Control, which tried the same to her with the faces of her parents.
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
I want to see Rose and Piero having a huge charge and fight among the vehicles and everything else in there. Plus, the reactor vent smells like asking for trouble with the small force cap, and the test chambers might get us stuck dealing with GlaDOS.
- Location
- in the trash
Reminder that we did in fact go with the plan that has us throwing a lot of armoured assets at the problem, and the vents don't really let us leverage that.
That said, we don't know if Yinzheng has had enough time to reconfigure the internal defences, so it may be worth mixing it up.
Most of the Test Facility defences are probably configured to stun and subdue as the default, rather than kill on sight. It may be worth a shot.
That said, we don't know if Yinzheng has had enough time to reconfigure the internal defences, so it may be worth mixing it up.
Most of the Test Facility defences are probably configured to stun and subdue as the default, rather than kill on sight. It may be worth a shot.
- Location
- in the trash
Also, the most important reason to not kill Ling:
"...If you kill her, my ex-boyfriend miiiight go a little crazy and try to end the world by turning everyone into orange juice."
"He can't do that if I liquefy all his organs first. Including the cybernetic ones."
"...If you kill her, my ex-boyfriend miiiight go a little crazy and try to end the world by turning everyone into orange juice."
"He can't do that if I liquefy all his organs first. Including the cybernetic ones."
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
[X] Hug her. "She's mine now. She's a valuble asset who was given bad orders, and was unable to act contrary to her programming. Now that I have her, I can atone for my past sins against her by saving her life and fixing her." Tightens hug. "Thank you for your assistance."
[X] Surprise mat-trans assault. At the back of the assault force is a secret, heavily-disguised one-use mobile mat-trans. It's only slightly experimental, but more importantly it isn't an asset that Dr. Leon even knows exists. With the outside forces destroyed and the interior forces rapidly re-positioning, now is the perfect time to crush the enemy's plans into dust.
My plans are inspired and have no flaws.
[X] Surprise mat-trans assault. At the back of the assault force is a secret, heavily-disguised one-use mobile mat-trans. It's only slightly experimental, but more importantly it isn't an asset that Dr. Leon even knows exists. With the outside forces destroyed and the interior forces rapidly re-positioning, now is the perfect time to crush the enemy's plans into dust.
My plans are inspired and have no flaws.
FourthWall
May The Sun Never Blind Your Eyes
- Location
- Chiraq
I love Piero so much. So very, very much.
I want to see Shinjeet go crazy and possibly on an Asuka choking bender, so I will abstain from this vote
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
All in all, my vote is going to be one big "I agree with @Strypgia". Motivation-wise, Henriette is arguing from the heart here - and even if she fails, it's a sign of how she's grown and how she's more than just a ItX bot. Likewise, if it succeeds - or if it fails - it also touches on Piero's character development.
The Hangar Bay is for the tactical reason that going into the Testing Zones will be a deathtrap filled with focuses that the local Progenitors can use - you know, pits of acid, walls that require you to fire Corr 4 portals at them, homicidal bio-organic AIs run on potatos. Meanwhile, while I think the vents can work, the problem there is that we'd be splitting off the most capable and most skilled elements of our forces from the rest, who'll get mauled like fuck if any heavy hostile assets redeploy. We don't want to open ourselves up to defeat in detail. If we'd wanted to do this commando style, we should have started off porting Rose and co into their heart using the traitor's codes, not diverging mid-mission.
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
All in all, my vote is going to be one big "I agree with @Strypgia". Motivation-wise, Henriette is arguing from the heart here - and even if she fails, it's a sign of how she's grown and how she's more than just a ItX bot. Likewise, if it succeeds - or if it fails - it also touches on Piero's character development.
The Hangar Bay is for the tactical reason that going into the Testing Zones will be a deathtrap filled with focuses that the local Progenitors can use - you know, pits of acid, walls that require you to fire Corr 4 portals at them, homicidal bio-organic AIs run on potatos. Meanwhile, while I think the vents can work, the problem there is that we'd be splitting off the most capable and most skilled elements of our forces from the rest, who'll get mauled like fuck if any heavy hostile assets redeploy. We don't want to open ourselves up to defeat in detail. If we'd wanted to do this commando style, we should have started off porting Rose and co into their heart using the traitor's codes, not diverging mid-mission.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
What a lovely christmas present.
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
I was going to like, bother thinking about it but then @Strypgia did everything I wanted to.
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
I was going to like, bother thinking about it but then @Strypgia did everything I wanted to.
- Location
- U.S.
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
Yeah people make good arguments for this.
I am impressed though, Henriette was damn good once she lost her ARC, Harlan and Jamelia should be proud.
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
Yeah people make good arguments for this.
I am impressed though, Henriette was damn good once she lost her ARC, Harlan and Jamelia should be proud.
[X] Idealistic
[X] The Hangar Bay
The first vote is a choice between Pragmatic vs. Idealistic for me, and the difference is how much Henriette actually believes what she was saying to Ling at the start of the update. If she was actually trying to apologize for the reasons she claimed (which I think is where y'all have been going with it), that's more in line with Idealistic; Pragmatic would certainly be appropriate for some characters or some situations, but maybe not this one.
For the second, the Test Facility is an obvious trap, I think we can rule that one out right away. As for the other two, I see Piero as more likely to go for the direct assault, and if things get ugly, we're less likely to get picked off by things we can't fire back at.
[X] The Hangar Bay
The first vote is a choice between Pragmatic vs. Idealistic for me, and the difference is how much Henriette actually believes what she was saying to Ling at the start of the update. If she was actually trying to apologize for the reasons she claimed (which I think is where y'all have been going with it), that's more in line with Idealistic; Pragmatic would certainly be appropriate for some characters or some situations, but maybe not this one.
For the second, the Test Facility is an obvious trap, I think we can rule that one out right away. As for the other two, I see Piero as more likely to go for the direct assault, and if things get ugly, we're less likely to get picked off by things we can't fire back at.
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
It can still be Idealistic under Pragmatic. She might just be phrasing it that way because she thinks Pragmatic will sell better to Piero even if there is Idealism backing it.
Sure, and I could also see her starting off with Pragmatic, then if that's not working, open up and show the real Idealistic reason.
Spear
Sun-In-Rags
- Location
- North Macedonia
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
Man, Piero is all kinds of bullshit, even more now that he's not basically running Rip&Tear.exe.
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
Man, Piero is all kinds of bullshit, even more now that he's not basically running Rip&Tear.exe.
- Location
- Cyberpunk capital of the world
[X] Idealistic: Isn't the mark of a good military commander knowing how to use force effectively, which also includes showing mercy on non-threats instead of inefficiently wasting force on them?
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
Tanks indoors are cool. Too bad we don't have our own spidertank.
[X] The Hangar Bay: Yes, it's very open and gives room to maneuver. But it also lets you advance the greatest number of forces through.
Tanks indoors are cool. Too bad we don't have our own spidertank.