Looking forward to it.
I'm just going to vomit something to digital paper and go to sleep.
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The boy comes in for the next order. The pizza parlor smells of burnt cheese and broken dreams. His boss fixes him with a look that says 'son, it's bad'. Then he hands him the bag.
There's a pizza inside. Which isn't strange. But there's only one. Which is strange. The boss knows he can deliver on time for ten locations across the university city, with not a single pizza going luke-warm. And he's not even a pyromancer.
But the note on top explains anything. An address. The address.
That place.
Again.
"I'm taking the fast bike."
"Take the armor as well, and leave the uniform. If you get caught speeding, you don't work at Luigi's."
He speeded. Through streets and narrow alleys, along the tracks of subways and elevated train tracks, making sure never to give anyone reason to call the traffic authorities. And when he came within a kilometer of the mark, he almost brought the hover-bike to an efficient but quiet stop.
Quiet was key. Maybe.
The harsh buzz of the engine receded to a low, almost unnoticeable hum and he coasted by under tall tenements. There was nowhere to hide along the road here, no cover, no way to enter a block this central from anywhere else. He was approaching from the enemy direction, exposed, as was designed.
He had tried other approaches, but it was never really feasible, just silly fantasies that crashed harshly against cold reality. He had to keep the bike. He could scale the wall fast enough. He couldn't ask Ben to teleport him. That would be cheating.
So he crept, in case someone human had called his boss. In case the street wasn't being watched. He played the odds, as one did on Avernus.
He lost.
By what sense he knew, there was no telling. He wasn't a psyker, that much had been confirmed. But it wasn't sight or sound or touch, because the beast came from below, through the street, from behind. By the time he reaction, there was nothing do but save the objective.
He threw the pizza in the air. A ton of ghostly predator tore through his chest, leaving his nerves, solar plexus, spine, all that could feel - freezing. Numb.
Feeling was lost, he couldn't feel his toes, his fingers. He could only see them, and reach by muscle memory and vision as gravity brought the pizza box straight back down to him. Balance was almost lost on the floating contraption below him, tipping to the right, but his feet must have gotten the message and done something to the pedals, because he almost fell off as the bike accelerated, fast enough to keep him from falling. Just long enough to regain balance and avoid collision with an armored wall.
The turn sent the beast dashing past him, back through the wall and out of sight.
He was still accelerating. He'd been going past all speed limits a second ago, and now he almost missed the turn, wrenched the handles, leaned left hard enough to bring his face with hands-width from the smooth but unforgiving ground.
He almost made it.
Instead he hit another armored wall, at an angle. The hover-field found purchase, and threw him up, up, the ground was disappearing, so far - oh, there the tiger charged past again, missing it's mark for a third time. A record.
Focus! His parabola reached its peak, the ground would meet him again, and not at anything resembling a soft angle this time. He knew what had to be done. With the last split-second afforded to him, he took in the surroundings from his temporary vantage point. He would get no more.
The bike fell. The hover-field touched the bottom of the arch, pushed against it, but the thin plastic chassis touched, and crumbled with a painful sound as it slid and tumbled around across the ground.
The piston-assisted power-greaves took the fall, and not his legs. He'd jumped midway down, while he still had a little control over the fall and time to move. The landing turned into a sprint, a hopeless, brief struggle against the inevitable, thermo-isolating box clutched in both gauntleted hands. He had turned his jump toward the end line, but those last fifty meters may as well have been the road to Yphax.
He saw it coming in the helmet's full-directional sensor display, from his five. And it wasn't even running.
It was no wonder, of course. They both know how this would end now that he was on foot. To be honest, they'd both known it from the start. It was no use negotiating, threats did nothing, even directed and made good on at the delivery. Holding the pizza close to his body could not confuse his enemy, it devoured with too much accuracy. Dodging and weaving, at this speed, would only serve to embarrass himself.
He knew this without thinking. There wasn't any time for thinking, because the cat had already closed in by the time he
knew.
He was prey, and he'd lost. Again.
Fuc-.
Snot and blood sprayed a clenched gauntlet - wait,
his, and the tiger phased through the power-armored pizza delivery boy. But in it's pain, for just a moment, it forgot.
Ludwig moved on instinct and training, kept moving, but was no less astounded when he realized that he was still holding the handle of a thermo-isolating box. A box that weighed more than an empty pizza box should weigh.
And then he stood before the plasteel-gates of his goal. Per automated habit from long days of bringing warm meals to lazy bodies, or maybe from repeated, narcissistic fantasies, he pressed the bell. The door had already opened.
Behind him, a large phase-tiger sat on the road, absently licking it's face with it's broad tongue. Before him, the Governor's Hound pulled a miraculously intact container of cardboard out of the thermo-box, smiled as he said something that probably didn't matter, handed him a dirty lousy couple of credits, and closed to door.
Ludwig stood there a few seconds. Then he pulled off his plate-masked helmet, turned around and went past the tiger.
"I can't believe you didn't dodge that either. Getting soft."
How do you turn
into
Are you just multiplying by three? We can't spend that much very fast, each expansion and cathedral will take 6,2 turns in total. We can make a lot of resources in-between purchases, and we don't need to build them all back-to-back, and for security we absolutely shouldn't expand two hives at a time, ever. After the end of this trade cycle, we will still have a good few turns worth of AM and EM stockpile to build big cathedrals in, and each substantially postpones the bottom of the barrel.
As for (basic) material, you're not taking into account our doubling of material production from next turn onwards. And If we can't take that give expansion next turn, then let's build the cathedral-forge or forge-cathedral in the meantime, that's very useful too. Or we can just spend a few Administratum actions to make those additional resources. That won't have to be done very many times.
Munition Stores - we don't need to stress about building that as soon as possible. Power Armoured Militia ditto.
[Edit] and this time I really am going to sleep. Don't vote Signe and close it until I'm back!
