Gromweld
Learning By Mistake
Normally, without any corruption issues, yes.
Alchemical Solutions [Worm/Exalted] Thread 15: Occluded Orb Obsessively Observes Obscene Operations
- Thread starter Gromweld
- Start date
Ridtom
Good. Bad. I'm the man with the Wand.
Yeah, I found his wording awkward, but I loved his ideas. It was also coincidentally the name of a Stephen King short story which is tangibly similar an inspired by Alfred.
Surpised someone else has heard of him. Everyone else just draws a blank when I mention it.
Stripes
Genre-Savvy Anti-Nihilist
- Location
- Nizhniy Novgorod
Someone fragged Dragon Backup? Because with how her synchronization works (in bursts trough satellite - so restoring should be initiated the moment Dragon enters Twins Pocket... Assuming she did not altered procedure) , our little bit of mischief should not affect restoring from backup.
...Or you are nasty, nasty (also bad) boy who cooked up a couple of surprises?..
I wonder if, having a Lore of 5, and a specialty in parahumans, Taylor would know Riley=Bonesaw.
- Location
- The end of all things
It's not a disguise if Riley is a known alias of Bonesaw, which is quite possible, considering that it's her real name. Might be pretty obscure, though.
Or assumes you mean the B5 character named after him.
Now I'm very interested in finding out what happened regarding that.
Ridtom
Good. Bad. I'm the man with the Wand.
I knew I should have watched that show when I had the chance....
A prototype mass-scanner, configurable to detect the Corona whateveritscalled
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
EOA's Optical Enhancement already does that (specifically the Diagnostic Overlay), without mote cost, and she has the Diagnostics specialty for Medicine.
And that would only let her know that Siberian isn't a biological cape anyway.
Jack Folstam
Refinement of Copper
It wouldn't even let her know that, because changer/breaker capes might flat out not have those brain lobes.
Quantumboost
Now with 50% more dots in Dimensional Science
- Location
- Ensemble Space
I'm pretty sure the medical diagnostics can tell you when something you're trying to scan isn't a living thing. That seems like a pretty important thing to notice when you're diagnosing someone.
Ridtom
Good. Bad. I'm the man with the Wand.
MD: "Hmmm."
QA: "What's up?"
MD: "Nothing, something just seems... off about the naked lady chasing us with stripes."
QA: "Naked Lady... stripes... Oh! You mean the Void Maker! Yeah, pretty powerful Projection Shard."
MD: "You mean she's not real?!"
QA: "Nope! Mommy and Daddy used it to carve out empty Planet-toids! Didn't use a biological form until we ran into the Zarnx Empire. Good times were had by all!"
MD: "You scare me."
QA: "AS I SHOULD. I AM THE ADMINISTRATOR OF YOUR PERFECTION. PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH EDEN EARTH WGAH'NAGL FHTAGN."
You missed the most relevant portion of the quote
We had the TIME to acquire it.
People just bandwagoned the suit without considering immediate tactical utility.
I LIKE this one.
The base tech in particular works with the drone heavy theme that Weaver has been going for; a last ditch defensive system
Reminds me of Mr Terrific's drones.
Need to change the name though.
Maybe.
But not from across the city; Jack's range is limited.
Yeah.
Either Bezalel is a willing participant feeding them info, or he's so thoroughly Mastered that it makes no difference.
I suspect his info guided poor Sakura right into the middle of an ambush in Hacksaw's null range, which would explain her inability to port out.
Don't think that would work on Aisha though, which suggests she's still out there.
Why would we exalt Bonesaw of all people?
I like the girl as much as t anyone, and she would make a fine addition to Weaver's Home for Orphan Girls.
But booting her into an Alchemical form without years or decades of therapy is just asking for her to go Voidtech.
And our PR is unlikely to take the hit well.
Unless she can reconfigure the rockets to come out of her feet instead.
Par for the course when Dragon code meets Weaver Essencehax.
Apparently bullshitEssencehax reacts badly with alien-SpaceWhale derived biology, whether organic or digital.
Lemme point out that Taylor also got a look at a shard connection, albeit in digital code; Dragon's shard to be exact.
And she did this with ISF up, so the Stranger effect should not hold.
That is almost as big a deal as the prospect of unchaining Dragon.
It is.
Except when Weaver is involved; the last time she experimented with EOA's power, she was incommunicado for several hours.
See above.
Nope, no disguise there.
Pretty sure Riley's identity is public record; the list of S9 victims certainly is, and people would have noticed the six year old showing up after the Nine killed off the family.
ChandraMagic
I can't be bothered to expend the energy to care
To be fair to everyone involved in this, only one person voted for Dodge (at least, according to vote tally). So, Bear Templar is being vindicated on his vote choice.
sainen
Elder Lich
sort of like how we got that Chef rep that's going to be completely useless for the whole of Arc 8, except the dragon suit is more valuable even if it isn't currently applicable.
Depends on how you count range to Dragon, who in a sense is omnipresent.
Lack of heroic motivation either.
If you stretched it really hard she might look like Orichalcum if you squinted, but she's more a victim than primary actor.
MIGHT be possible. Or possibly, no need for Essence based exhaust flares to burn fabric.
She'd need more Occult and meditating on her charms to make it work out.
Magically skilled plastic surgeon. A name isn't enough to find one little girl in the whole of America. Remember in the S9000 arc she just goes out on her own without a costume, and isn't recognized.
Gromweld
Learning By Mistake
Interlude: Chevalier
***
Robert Hoover couldn't remember when he'd first caught on to it, but within the first few months of his time in the newly-christened 'Wards' program he had started to pick up what Hero had called a 'danger sense.' Eidolon had confirmed that it wasn't anything to do with his secondary Thinker power, and after talking it over with Mary and Hannah, it wasn't something unique to just him.
It manifested differently for everyone, he learned as the years went by. For many, it was a slow tightening of the diaphragm, causing a churning feeling in one's gut and a noticeable increase in air intake (something about the body accelerating oxygen absorption rates). Others, it was a prickling feeling on the back of their neck and down their spine, giving the classic impression of "being watched." It was slightly different for everyone, but one thing was certain: those that developed it, and payed attention to it, lived. Those that didn't, died.
It was a major reason he allowed Kali such leniency in her training habits for the Wards, as Philadelphia hadn't lost a Ward in the five years since Roundabout died and Bladedancer took over. The Youth Guard had been furious about her methods at first, and he'd needed to go to bat against them more than once to prevent Kali from being replaced, but it always came down to the same result: a paranoid Ward was better than a dead Ward. In retrospect, he often wondered if more of his own Ward team would be alive if Eidolon, Legend, Alexandria, and Hero had been as aggressive in their training.
So when Robert's hands started tingling and he felt a chill go down his spine, just as he was walking past the main underground entrance to the Tinkertech Labs, he yanked his cannonblade from the magnetic clamp on his back and assumed a combat stance.
"Whoa, what the hell, Chevalier?" came the justifiably-alarmed voice of Who from his side, but Robert - Chevalier, now that he was focused - listened to his senses as he scanned the corridor. A quiet moment passed, but he kept his guard up; in his experience, it was never, "just a strange feeling."
Two seconds later, he spun at the sound he'd heard a handful of times in years past: the shearing, metallic keen of the Tinkertech Labs' emergency security barriers slamming shut.
There had been no alarm sounded, no alert from the scientists over the public address systems, and no planned tests of Protectorate Island's security features. Chevalier processed these facts at a deep, subconscious level, while his body reacted on instinct towards the perceived threat.
Consciously, he focused on various materials and items stored - phased, with his power - within the blade: density of the shard of Marrow's hyper-dense armor stored within it, size of the fifteen-foot wooden pole, shape of his razor-edged 'deadly force' blade, weight of styrofoam.
The blade still reshaping in his hands, Chevalier took a half-step and jammed the tip of the blade into the descending four-foot wall of reinforced steel, ceramics, and other bizarre alloys that the PRT hoped would counter (or at least, delay) a potential runaway-disaster of Tinkertech. The hilt of his blade jerked out of his hands, the force of the descending wall driving the pommel of the blade into - and slightly through - the ceramic tile on the floor.
His power struggled against the mountain of pressure the security barrier exerted against the blade, still attempting to distend to the length of the wooden pole contained within. Backup gears and servos in the door's frame crackled with electricity and strained metal, pushing the hilt of his blade deeper and deeper into the floor until finally the cannonblade's wide cross-guard stopped its descent. As Chevalier felt the oncoming of a power-induced headache, he quickly considered other available objects and materials before switching out the fifteen-foot pole for a six-foot one.
A split-second of high-pitched squealing later, the massive barrier finally settled as Chevalier's blade finished shifting into its new, shorter length. Barely five feet of clearance remained between the floor and the bottom of the blast wall.
The entire process had taken less than five seconds.
"What the shit-"
"Go!" Chevalier barked at the young Stranger, pointing with a free hand at the gap underneath the four feet of defensive armor. "We can't be on this side of the barrier!"
Spewing a litany of curses, the baseball-themed Ward quickly sprinted underneath the wall, and Chevalier followed immediately after. Standing up straight again on the opposite side, his right hand darted to the small pouch of supplies strapped to his armor's back and slid out the four-inch version of one of his backup blades - already growing in length as he began to use his power to give it proper combat traits. It didn't have nearly as many materials and objects stored within it as his primary blade did, but that was only due to budgetary concerns, not a lack of preparedness.
He hadn't lost his main blade in over eight years, and his idle habit of storing more and more items and materials into it meant it was worth somewhere in the range of ten to fifteen million dollars.
He really didn't want to lose it; the paperwork involved in replacing it would be astronomical.
His power would fade and cause the items phased within to eject if he didn't stay within six feet of the blade, but there was at least a few minutes before his power's effect began to degrade. Hopefully he could get to the bottom-
Above him, a turret popped out of the ceiling and aimed at the two heroes. He heard it more than he saw it, what with his helmet's slightly-reduced field of vision, but he was already lashing it out with his backup blade before the telltale sound of sprayed containment foam began.
"What the flying fuck is going on!?" asked an unknown voice from somewhere around him.
Chevalier spun on his left foot and assumed a defensive stance against the originator of the voice, a demand for them to identify themselves on his lips just as the young Stranger in front of him suppressed her power and recognition bloomed in his mind.
"Who? What are you doing here?!"
"I-" stammered the Ward, still holding her tinkertech baseball bat in front of her as if she could have possibly parried his blade, "I came over to help Weaver move her shit back home! We were going to see her in the Labs, then everything went fuckin' nuts! What's going on?!"
That… yes, that made sense. He even vaguely remembered picking her up at the front entrance of the Island a few minutes ago, and listening to some of her irreverent chatter about the prank war she, Clockblocker, and Weaver had waged over the last week. He pushed the returning memories to the side and focused back on the pressing issues at-hand.
"That's the quarantine wall for when something goes wrong in the Tinkertech Labs," Chevalier motioned with his head while he lined up shots with his cannonblade at the next six turrets popping out further down the hall. Focusing his power as he fired, he gave the quarter-sized projectiles the weight and density of tungsten after they had left the rifle chamber at the base of the blade - easily drilling holes through each squat turret. After the deafening cracks from its firing and the clattering of metal from the destroyed turrets died down, he spared a glance at the Ward.
Her body was in a practiced combat stance designed to anticipate attackers from any angle, and her head jerked back and forth; still a little too much tension, but good. She also kept her right hand on her bat's grip and her left hand free and elevated - either to brace the bat or grab at something if needed - which was likely a mimicking of Bladedancer's own stance as he knew Kali hadn't started them on intense weapon training yet. Still, it was good for barely a month of training.
If the base's defenses truly were compromised, as he was beginning to fear, she might last a few more seconds.
"Your power doesn't work on computers, correct?"
"No," she replied, shifting awkwardly in her combat stance at the admission. "Fuck, is that what's going on? Our own shit is hacked? Where the fuck is Dragon?"
"It's the only explanation for the lack of alarms or announcements. Hopefully Bezalel can turn things around, otherwise someone needs to get to the control room in the Administration building and shut it all down manually."
"This's happened before?"
"Twice, but there are enough safeguards that we had warnings before. That there's nothing-"
Chevalier let his voice trail off in a sigh as he recognized a growing staccato of metal -a clanging, whirring, and buzzing of gears, servos, and pistons.
"Ah, good, that sounds like Bezalel's drones. He should be able to give us an update through them."
As if on cue, a massive robotic gorilla rounded the corner; complete with artificial hair, skin, and eyes, the only sign of its metallic nature was the unnaturally-metallic footfalls it made on the tiled floors. Flanking it were well over a dozen types of different bird drones, all similarly lifelike in their appearance, with several of them resting on the larger beast's shoulders. Chevalier began to raise an arm in greeting, when the mouth of the gorilla opened wide and flashed a brilliant red.
The foot-wide crimson beam that lanced out from its mouth struck him dead-center in his chest, blasting him back into the half-lowered barrier but only left a blackened mark on the silver plating.
Thanking his paranoia for keeping up his armor's density at all times, Chevalier staggering to his feet as the swarm of drones and mechanical gorilla charged his position.
"Command override!" he roared, lining up a shot on the gorilla's left arm. "Voice authorization: Chevalier dash four seven eight eight!"
As one, the artificial gorilla halted its movements while the avian drones glided gracefully to the floor and locked up. For a moment, there was silence.
Then the mouth of each mechanical creature opened wide and the synthetic voice of a man echoed into the long hallway.
"This is Bezalel. I'm not home. Leave a message at the beep."
Fourteen answering-machine beeps rang out, followed by each of the drones' mouths snapping shut with mechanical clicks.
"Bezalel, wha-" Chevalier managed to blurt out, but immediately after voicing the Tinker's name the mouths of all the drones popped open again.
"This is Bezalel. I'm not home. Leave a message at the beep."
This time, however, the drones sprang forward with inhuman speed and force, crossing dozens of yards in a heartbeat.
"Holy shit!" came a voice from around him, but Chevalier was more concerned with the thousands of pounds of mechanical death trying to pummel him with a two-fisted overhead slam. Chevalier quickly sidestepped and made the robotic primate pay for the move with a rising slash at its right armpit, cutting deeply into its inner workings and making the arm flail wildly for split-second before it went limp.
As he backed away from the massive beast, he noted a some of the birds try to throw themselves at his legs, arms, and head as distractions. The few that struck him barely made him flinch, but for some reason the rest of the birds seemed to be focused on something else around him.
"Fucking birds! Fuck you! Die!"
The unknown voice behind his back made Chevalier leap to the side again, ensuring that it was no longer behind him while still maintaining a guard against the multi-ton metallic primate. So lifelike was its appearance - besides the leaking synthetic fluids and sparking wires visible under it's right arm, now - that he caught an emotion of apprehension as it glanced at something to Chevalier's right and then back to him before snarling and leaping for a crushing grapple.
But its aim was wildly off, almost as if it was reaching out for something else.
"Aaaah!" came a high, panicked scream, somewhere off to his right. The snapping and crunching sound of armor and bone being pulverized followed.
Chevalier's gut twisted at the sound, but he was already driving the full length of his cannonblade into the exposed upper back of the massive drone. A small explosion of sparks erupted from the wound as seven feet and nearly four thousand pounds of metal lost collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
He heard another pained cry as the beast toppled over, but Chevalier pushed the easily-forgotten - yet somehow still troubling - sound out of his mind. Yanking the blade free of the downed gorilla drone, Chevalier made quick work of the rest of the avian drones with nine slashes and a shot from his cannonblade to dispense with the last fleeing bird.
That was strange, he didn't recall destroying the other four bird-drones.
Frowning at the thought, he resized his blade to an easier-to-carry three feet in length and then turned back to where his original blade was still keeping the massive quarantine wall propped open. The cross-guard was slowly burrowing into the floor as well, but Chevalier had not heard or seen any sign of scientists fleeing from the labs yet.
"Ch-cheva-"
Whirling around at the recognizable, pained gasp, Chevalier gaped in horror at Who's mangled form lying partially underneath the robotic gorilla. The drone's enormous left hand was still wrapped in a pulverizing grip around her right shoulder and tucked-in arm, and its abrupt termination had caused it to fall shoulder-first into her lower legs - pinning them against the wall. All across her body there were massive rents in her armor from where the avian drones had slashed her, but a silverish layering underneath the armor appeared to have remained intact.
He ignored the flickering images behind her, of dark hands reaching out, grasping, tearing at her body and clothes.
"Who!" he exclaimed in growing panic, already looking for a way to pry the Ward loose. "When did you get here?!"
"I've… urgh… been here the whole fuckin' time," she weakly ground out as Chevalier carefully moved his blade to fulcrum the fallen primate off of her legs. "Fuckin'... hate my power… sometimes."
"Your power doesn't work on dones, then?"
"You just-" the young Stranger spit out in frustration before being interrupted by a gasp of pain. "N-no, it fucking doesn't. Try to remember that."
Chevalier grimaced, realizing that Who's power had likely caused some iteration of this conversation several times already.
"You need to focus everything you can on not letting your power slip anymore. I can't defend you if I don't know you're here, and it looks like the drones are prioritizing easier targets. Now… get ready. This is going to hurt."
Chevalier leaned on his bade, shifting the robotic carcass almost a foot back from the wall. Now no longer supported by the drone's shoulder, Who sank to the floor in a twisted mess of pulped knees and shins.
Whatever indignant curse was on her lips - likely a protest that she wasn't an easy target - died as the young Stranger passed out from the pain and crumpled even further.
Chevalier blinked in confusion, then stood up warily and pulled his blade up from where it was wedged against the corner of the wall and the floor.
Why am I prying the fallen gorilla away from the wall?
Looking around, he reoriented himself by reviewing the events up until that moment. He had been walking to the Tinkertech Labs… by himself? Yes, that felt right. He was going to pick up Weaver after her tests with Dragon had concluded early and she had been allowed some free time to talk with the technicians about some of the more recent acquisitions and tests. Uriel wanted her off the Island tonight, and Chevalier had been off-duty, so…
Hmm, but why did I stop by the front entrance?
"Chevalier!"
Weaver's voice, coming from beyond the half-stuck quarantine barrier, jolted him out of his introspection. Taking a balanced, kneeling position - in case another group of drones suddenly rounded the far corner- he peered underneath the barrier.
"Weaver?" he called out loudly, keeping his cannonblade trained in the general direction of the previous sound. The disorienting feeling he still had surrounding his memories implied there was some sort of Master or Stranger effect at play, which would also explain why Bezalel had flipped, but it never hurt to be too cautious.
"SINGULARITY PURGE INITIATED. STEP AWAY FROM THE BLAST DOORS."
Just as the ominous robotic voice finished blaring its declaration, several things happened at once.
The floor upon which Chevalier's original blade had been wedged against dropped, as the entire Tinkertech Lab building began its plummet towards the naked singularity being generated five hundred feet below.
A torrent of pressurized air blasted out of the narrowing gap between the quarantine barrier and the floor, pushed out by the falling building.
Thousands of pounds of steel, ceramics, and exotic materials slammed home, sealing off the falling building and its doomed inhabitants.
Weaver appeared out of thin air as she tumbled into his forward leg and collapsed on the floor, yelping in pain from striking his armored shin face-first.
A thunderous rumble nearly managed to knock Chevalier off his feet, a deep, menacing roar of reality torn asunder and millions of pounds of matter compressed to a single point in space. The shaking continued, until a massive metallic bang came from overhead - massive metal doors at ground-level sealing off the hole where the building once was - and this time Chevalier was knocked off his feet from the jolt.
On the ground, Chevalier could feel the deep, gut-churning roar growing - a wordless, infinite hunger that shook the world harder and harder with its need. He tried to scream out to Weaver, but the sound was lost even to his own ears.
Like a bored god had suddenly changed channels on the universe, the howling fury of the naked singularity winked out, leaving only a dull trembling of the earth in its wake.
Long moments passed as Chevalier's eardrums attempted to process normal sounds again, and the air reaching his lungs felt lighter than he remembered it.
"Cheva- oh, Maker! Who!"
Feeling Weaver clamber over him and towards the remains of the robotic gorilla, Chevalier allowed her to pass and then cautiously pushed himself to his feet while still maintaining his grip on his cannonblade. Turning his head towards Weaver, he noted her hair and skin morphing back to their 'default' state as her obsidian forearms and hands - claws, really - seemed to shatter into dozens of deeply-disturbing knives, scissors, prongs, and needles.
"Weaver?" he asked, stepping forward while his eyes tried to focus on what she was hovering over… and failed. "What are you doing?"
"What do you- oh. Chevalier, who was with you while you were fighting-"
"No one. I was alone," he replied quickly, with some minor confusion. He blinked at the pull of some forgotten memory, but shook it off as he shifted his armor around in preparation for further combat.
He cocked his head as Weaver bit off a curse, but she still seemed fixated on… whatever she was doing.
"There is a Stranger on the Philadelphia Wards team. Her power makes you forget she is or was around."
Narrowing his eyes in thought - and in frustrated concentration - he mentally reviewed the Wards roster. He knew there were thirteen, as he recounted…
Wait, yes. There is a Stranger on the team, but… oh.
"She's," he tried, making an uncertain gesture towards the vague area around Weaver, "around here? Injured?"
A nod, though from where he was standing he could make out her desperate, pained expression.
"Critically hurt. Her right arm and shoulder are completely crushed, and everything below her thighs is… not recoverable. I'm going to have to take her legs off before the internal bleeding kills her. Same with the arm, and I'll have to open her chest up to pump out the blood in the right lung before I seal it off."
Chevalier didn't let his legs buckle.
"Without you here, I would have left her to die. Walked away as she bled out."
"I- well, she was coming to visit, so I would have been here anyway." Silence, for a moment, before her voice rose up again. "It's- it's not your fault, Chevalier. Her power-"
"I oversee the Wards," he ground out, the metal of his right gauntlet squealing lightly under the increased pressure of his grip. He tried again to see the what his failure had cost a young woman, but his mind guided his eyes to a random point on the wall. "Our... My precautions for her power weren't good enough. I may have just cost her her career, and we still have to carry her out of the most heavily-guarded base after the Birdcage."
Weaver worked in silence, allowing Chevalier a moment to push away the self-doubt and begin to plan a way out.
"My swarm on the surface is being targeted by the turrets now," Weaver eventually stated cleanly, the crystalline harmonics of her voice echoing a bit more loudly now. "I managed to spell out that 'Bezalel drones gone rogue' over the side of the Administration building, but I'm not sure if anyone saw it. Can you take out the cameras in this hallway? There are eight that I can see."
Chevalier frowned beneath his helmet at not having thought of that before, then set about stabbing his over-sized blade into the sensors that Weaver guided him to.
I'm not sure I would have found half of those, though.
"Next," she whispered over… some sound that made him grimace just trying to focus on it, "take the bird drones and place them gently on my back. The gorilla is too big - I've already tried absorbing it - but maybe I can figure something out from one of the birds."
He paused, about to wonder aloud whether or not it was safe for him to distract her from whatever she was doing; it was important, and it involved the gut-dropping understanding that he had possibly killed another Ward, but the details of it kept slipping from his mind each time his attention focused elsewhere. Before he could open his mouth, however, he shook the concern away.
She has that Thinker power that let her multitask. I guess that even applies to life-saving surgery.
The most intact bird-drone corpse looked like it had taken a vicious blow from a blunt object, cracking its head and spine in a 'U' shape. Gathering it up with one hand, Chevalier carefully lowered it so that it its body rested gingerly on Weaver's arched back-
With a snap and and series of mechanical noises, Chevalier felt the drone yanked out of his grasp as it began to fold up in impossible, reality-defying folds before being sucked up into a palm-sized door that had suddenly appeared between Weaver's shoulder blades. The door - somehow manifested through her baggy grey hoodie, as well - emitted a whistle of compressed air before the lid snap closed and faded away as if it had never been there.
Weaver, herself, never even flinched once throughout the entire process.
There's bizarre parahuman powers, and then there's that.
"I'm... hmm. It's similar enough to the one I absorbed at the party, but… there's something else. Can you bring me another one?"
Two more bizarrely-absorbed artificial birds later, Weaver's motions stilled.
"What's Bezalel's Tinker speciality? His real one?"
Chevalier rocked back, slightly, but he shouldn't have been surprised that she had managed to piece something together. Still…
"You're not cleared for that."
Weaver's head whipped around, revealing a face covered in splatters of blood where the tracts of tears had not washed it away. The obsidian spider legs framing her head twitched menacingly, and what dark, graphite-like skin he could see drank in the hallway's pale light.
The look in her narrowed, glowing golden eyes promised that she would have that information from him - willingly or not.
Behind her loomed the wavering image of a massive, incomprehensibly complex mechanical eye. Like every time Chevalier's Thinker power fixated on it, the image somehow turned to regard him directly. Plates and gears the size of continents shifted until the eye narrowed, radiating palpable disdain.
He had faced down Endbringers, but he could still feel dread from time to time.
"Cybernetic conversion," he admitted with a nod, though her eyes only widened slightly at the answer.
"You kept that from me?" she hissed. "After everything I've told you and the PRT about Autochthon?"
"Only Director Uriel, Director Costa-Brown, and I know about it," Chevalier shook his head, both to deny the accusation and to disperse the feeling of guilt. "Even Dragon doesn't know."
Her luminescent gaze searched his own mask, though he felt it protected him not at all. After a moment, she turned back to her work, snorting a bitter sigh through her nose.
Chevalier let her work in silence, turning back towards the opposite end of the hallway in preparation for another attack.
"His isn't perfect," he heard her grouse out. "At least his birds weren't. That explains why I was getting a mixture of instructions from my charm, though."
He nodded, already knowing as much. It was why he had been so leery of her claims of conversion, in the end. Several more minutes of wet, disturbing sounds echoing out from behind him passed, before the silence fell again.
"What is his big project? That he's been working on for the past few years?"
Chevalier grimaced, having expected this question. It was his leading idea of what had started this entire mess in the first place, after all.
"Converting himself."
At her continued silence, Chevalier warily turned to look at the young woman-turned-cyborg.
Her eyes regarded his own helmet, betraying nothing but focus. After several more seconds of silence, she nodded.
"I have a plan."
Sparks of blue and black electricity snapped out from the blazing white diamond in her forehead. They trailed out to her nightmarish halo of spider legs, causing them to twitch viciously.
"In this plan, I am going to carry Who, invisibly. You are going to fight me a path to Bezalel."
A spurt of blood from… somewhere… splashed across her face.
"Then, we are going to talk."
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sainen
Elder Lich
Bezalel - Cybernetic conversion
that seems like a low tier specialty all things considered, as Bonesaw(Medical?), Armsmaster(Miniaturization/Efficiency), Mannequin(environmental systems) , and Dragon(Reverse Engineer) were all capable of it on top of the rest of their tinkering.
and I nominate Who for Moonsliver
that seems like a low tier specialty all things considered, as Bonesaw(Medical?), Armsmaster(Miniaturization/Efficiency), Mannequin(environmental systems) , and Dragon(Reverse Engineer) were all capable of it on top of the rest of their tinkering.
and I nominate Who for Moonsliver
Quest
The Great One
- Location
- Everywhere