- Location
- Australia
Thanks, should be fixed now.
H+ Mayhem (Worm)
- Thread starter Jurric
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm tinker transhumanism mayhem
Thanks, should be fixed now.
actually...
3rd (gnats & lice),4rth (flies),8th (locusts, sure she can find some if she really wants)and 9th (darkness).
because skitter's bugs will blot out the sun. and i really doubt that the shade will be any comfort to her ennemies ^^
and i don't see skitter doing the fifth one, even if Emma IS a cow.
1.7
- Location
- Australia
"What 'ch doin'?" Rune said cheerfully, poking her head into my lab.
She'd unmasked to me three days ago, just two days after my introduction to Kaiser. Her real name was Zoey Macrel. I didn't know her in her civilian identity, so that didn't really matter to me. Probably better just to think of her as Rune. It would make fighting her easier, when the time came. She preferred Rune, even in private conversation, so it wasn't hard to do.
That was the danger of infiltrating an organization. Once you get to know most people they have at least some redeeming qualities. Rune was quite a nice person, friendly, cheerful. It was sick, what her parents did to her, but her 'uncle' Krieg had killed them, and now her loyalty to the 'cause' was almost unshakable. When I betrayed the gang she'd probably try to kill me, along with the rest.
And yet she was still good company.
Kaiser was still treating me with kid gloves. I was allowed to go wherever I wanted, but due to the Protectorate's manhunt it was 'recommended' that I travel with a 'bodyguard.' At least he'd selected some of his more intelligent and personable men to watch me. Krieg, Victor, sometimes Crusader. None of the hard cases like Hookwolf. Today it was Krieg's turn, and he'd brought his 'niece,' probably an attempt to socialize me, get me connected to the Empire at a deeper level. Or it could have been Rune's idea, as she claimed it was, a desire to meet the only other parahuman in the empire who was around her age.
"I guarantee you that if I actually answer that you'll throw up." I told her, the smile on my face not entirely forced.
Rune stepped into my lab, trailing her fingers over my equipment, her fingers twitching as she marked everything she passed. I was fairly sure that wasn't a sign of aggression, just a thing she did, a habit that was probably very useful to her. If I could only telekinetically lift something after I marked it, I'd mark everything in my proximity as well.
"Come on, I saw you open up your brain, and it wasn't that bad. How much you gunna bet?"
"Five bucks." I told her. Moving the fire extinguisher on my bench over a bit so she couldn't see my arm as she came closer.
She looked at Stacy, the nurse who I had met when I first came to clinic.
I'd finally figured out exactly what Stacy and her mother were on, a personalized blend of anti-depressants and marijuana. They were both functional addicts, quite capable of performing complex, delicate tasks under the influence, but their incessant cheerfulness was really, really getting on my nerves. It would be pretty easy to tinker up something that altered their neural chemistry to be resistant to the drugs, make them actually face what the world had to offer, and I was seriously tempted to do just that.
Stacy shook her head, keeping my secret from the inquisitive gang member, and I decided that I'd leave her neural alterations for another day.
Rune scrunched up her brow in thought, eyed the nearby biowaste bin, decided she was more brave than scared, and held out her hand.
"Cheapskate, it's not a guarantee if that's all you're betting, shake on it." She told me.
I smiled, and shook her hand with my left, an awkward grip, she'd held out her right hand, but I wasn't being tricked that easily.
"Fine fine. I'm curious now. Show me what you're doing." Rune demanded.
I pushed the fire extinguisher away. I'd get Stacy to put that back on the wall now, we were past the point where it might be needed, the battery had been successfully installed, and honestly, the chances of it exploding into flame had been incredibly remote anyway.
Rune stared at my right hand. She went a little pale, but she didn't look away, slowly accustoming herself to the sight.
"That's not… too bad. I mean, I think I can see your bones, I guess those are tendons, but it's not bleeding or anything, and I know you've turned your pain off. You owe me five bucks. And an explanation, that looks like a really complicated thingy-mabob. Why have you cut your hand up like that?"
"I'm installing a tazer." I told her, getting back to work on the circuitry. "We're past the hard part, the battery is installed in my radius and ulna, the two bones in the forearm. They won't produce blood cells anymore, but I've artificially boosted production for the rest of my body, so that's fine. The tricky part was making it so that the battery could bend and flex, like normal bone marrow."
"So now you're building the tazer itself?" Rune asked, eying the deep holes in my wrists. I had the tech to heal those up nice and quick though, without scarring. I was a pessimist, but I didn't want to go that emo.
"Yep. I want to be able to take someone out with a touch, so I've run the wires up my hand, into my fingers, I just need to make sure I can't electrocute myself, add a charging port, which is going to go near my elbow, and then make sure my body won't reject it every time Othala heals me."
Rune frowned.
"That's pretty cool. Just to let you know, if you prank me with that I'm going to mark your shirt and throttle you with it."
"Of course. This is for fighting, not pranks." I told her seriously.
"Heh, so serious, for someone with the name Mayhem you spend way too much time locked in a lab." Rune said, turning her eyes away from my very delicate operation and spying a swivel chair. She collapsed into it theatrically, squiggled with her finger on the seat, and then lifted it with her power, tilting it and raising it into a sort of semi-hammock transport.
"All right. Where's my money." She demanded impishly.
I gestured vaguely in the direction of my wallet with my left hand, I kept it near the door, though why I bothered to keep cash in it was beyond me. I had a budget now, several thousand dollars a month, and an initial bonus to get me started, but of course I spent that through the empire. I talked with Victor about what I needed, and he got it for me. Scrounging for old computers at the dump was a thing of the past.
The new availability of resources, plus the extra time I had now that I wasn't going to school anymore, meant that I was catching up with my power. I wasn't there yet, but I was close. I'd rebuilt my mask, with wifi and new tinkertech microphones for listening in on far away conversations. I'd rebuilt my boots, and I was nearly finished with an improved version of my jetpack, I just needed to wait for my forges to finish smelting some of the more exotic elements, and for the reinforcements to my ribcage to set properly.
My old jetpack had been stolen from me. The new one would be a part of me. The sub-dermal braces would double as high grade body armor for my torso, the legs would be detachable, just in case I needed to fit in with the rest of society. I'd narrowed the legs and made them more flexible, to the point where it seemed more accurate to call them arms, then swapped out the four reactors I used to keep in the legs themselves, for two more effective ones that were going to be built into my back. There would be a couple of large, obvious lumps near my spine, but their profile was low enough to be covered by a shirt, my ribcage was tough enough to support the weight, and I could increase skin growth in the area, to prevent the flesh being pulled too tight and splitting.
Combing two of my tech trees like this was… interesting. I didn't have an actual blueprint for what I was doing, just a couple of other blueprints, and just enough skills to be able to work the two together. The end result wouldn't be quite safe as the original design, but I'd already modified the original design to explode on command, so that wasn't saying much.
In another week or so I should have enough energy to unlock a blueprint that would teach me how to directly run energy from the new reactors to the tazer in my hand, rather than rely on the batteries in my bones. That would be handy, the fully charged tazer only had enough energy for three bursts under normal conditions, then it needed a recharge.
I would have put off installing it until after I could run the tazer from the reactors, but I needed an excuse to open the hand up. You see, my espionage tree had born wonderful fruit.
But it didn't pay to think about that. Step one to a successful infiltration, think like you're one of them. Construct a personality, think how they want you to think, and trust yourself enough to pull back from the brink when the time comes. I'd very nearly done that literally, but the Mayhem protocol left me close enough to a Dissociative Identity Disorder as it was, so no thank you powers, I'd keep my brain re-writing to emotion manipulation.
I finished assembling the electronics in my hand, filled the fluid canisters very carefully, and then sealed the skin back up.
Rune rifled through my wallet for a while, complained loudly that I didn't have the right change, and collected a twenty. I let her. I'd learned not to argue, she had this way of floating above me and nagging until she got her way.
She floated over to my computer next, and I groaned inwardly. I built it myself, and of course I built as much processing power as I could into the thing. I wasn't a computer tinker by any means, but I had some basic knowledge, enough to make it slightly better than top of the line. When I built a fast computer though, I did it so I could perform complex calculations, run simulations for me, that sort of thing. I should never have tried to distract Rune with it.
She complained that it still couldn't run Crysis on max settings. I complained that she was cluttering my computer with unnecessary junk. Somehow it turned into an argument about aliens, which she won.
I don't know how she did that, but I do know that if I ever argued with her again, I wasn't doing it after I stayed up till five AM tinkering.
My flesh was knitting nicely when I heard the singing. Sweet, young. Familiar.
"The toe bone's connected to the, knee bone,
The knee bone's connected to the, hip bone,
The hip bone's connected to the, spine bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!"
It felt like ice going down my spine to hear that, familiar as it was.
"The fuck? What is this Mayhem?" Rune asked, floating rapidly away from the screen.
"One of the few videos of the only other living 'wet' tinker at work." I said, as casually as I could manage. I hadn't deleted that video simply because I didn't need to. Watching it could be justified, and trying to hide that I was looking up information about my sister might have been suspicious. Not that they knew she was my sister. We only casually resembled each other, and the PRT hadn't announced that fact, probably trying to prevent a panic.
I'd probably have to announce it myself soon. I couldn't leave Riley much longer. She was my sister. My responsibility. One way or the other, I planned to free her soon.
At first my plan had been to track the Nine down, attack them in a small town somewhere, where there would be less collateral damage. The only problem with that was the other members of the Nine. They were dangerous, not many of them would know my face, and I doubt that Jack described me to them, and then said, 'hey, I've got something special planned for this kid, bring him to me when you see him.' It would be just my luck if I attacked the Nine, and was killed on the outskirts of whatever town they were attacking by a patrolling Shatterbird or Siberan. No, I needed them to come to me. Needed Jack to stay true to his promise. Needed my sister nearby. There would be more collateral this way, but considering how many people the Nine had killed over the years, it would be small in comparison.
"Well, that was incredibly disturbing." Rune said, the computer shutting itself off as a pencil she'd been twirling shot towards the power button. She was looking far more green now than she had been when she was inspecting my arm.
I shrugged, staying silent and focused on my work.
"You're in a mood. Normally you tell me off when I don't shut your computer down properly." Rune told me.
"Perhaps I've just given up?" I told her, dipping my hand into a pre-prepared tub of chemicals that would prevent scars from forming, and aid in cell growth. I didn't really need Othala, although I had booked her in for when I installed the generators in my back. That would save me a significant amount of time.
"Hmm, nope. There's something going on. What's on your mind May? You can tell me." Rune demanded.
I winced internally. I did not like being called May, and Rune could never know, or it would be the only thing she ever called me.
"I guess I'm still annoyed that my blackmail didn't work out." I told her.
I had managed to scavenge a few brief scenes from my visor, but nothing that would be a huge PR disaster for them. The information on Sophia bullying Taylor was now nearly useless. The PRT had officially arrested their wayward Ward, and the 'Ongoing Investigation' into the matter was now closed. It had been startling, how quickly a startled Piggot could move.
A payout to the Heberts, a very carefully worded press statement, a small spree of arrests.
Part of me was still furious with Taylor, accepting a payout and a moving to Arcadia instead of going to the media. The hush money had probably been quite good, the main instigators of her torment were lined up to go to Juvie once sentencing was complete, and I'm fairly sure that Sophia's case worker was also serving jail time, but she could have used this to wreck the PRT, instead of signing a NDA with her father and just… letting it go.
"Yeah, annoying, but that's the PRT for you. They got the PR part down to an art. Only thing they're really good at." Rune said. "You need to forget about it, find something to take your mind off it. Uncle Krieg has got a bunch of Earth Aleph moves, and we just got a new wide-screen. You should come around tonight. I've invited Alabaster too, us newbie's got to stick together."
"I have to finish my generators. They're at a crucial stage." I told her.
Rune glanced at Stacy, who was silently tidying up the bench I'd been using for surgery, cleaning and disinfecting it with alcoholic swabs.
"You can tell me what to do, and I'll keep your forges running. They look pretty simple." Stacy said with a bright smile.
OK, I take it back. Her drug problem was going to be solved this afternoon. I just needed an excuse to strap her to the operating table so I could inject the right chemicals into her brain.
"It's not simple, it's really complicated. These are exotic forms of matter beyond the understanding of modern science!" I told them both.
Heh. Another argument that I had already lost.
She'd unmasked to me three days ago, just two days after my introduction to Kaiser. Her real name was Zoey Macrel. I didn't know her in her civilian identity, so that didn't really matter to me. Probably better just to think of her as Rune. It would make fighting her easier, when the time came. She preferred Rune, even in private conversation, so it wasn't hard to do.
That was the danger of infiltrating an organization. Once you get to know most people they have at least some redeeming qualities. Rune was quite a nice person, friendly, cheerful. It was sick, what her parents did to her, but her 'uncle' Krieg had killed them, and now her loyalty to the 'cause' was almost unshakable. When I betrayed the gang she'd probably try to kill me, along with the rest.
And yet she was still good company.
Kaiser was still treating me with kid gloves. I was allowed to go wherever I wanted, but due to the Protectorate's manhunt it was 'recommended' that I travel with a 'bodyguard.' At least he'd selected some of his more intelligent and personable men to watch me. Krieg, Victor, sometimes Crusader. None of the hard cases like Hookwolf. Today it was Krieg's turn, and he'd brought his 'niece,' probably an attempt to socialize me, get me connected to the Empire at a deeper level. Or it could have been Rune's idea, as she claimed it was, a desire to meet the only other parahuman in the empire who was around her age.
"I guarantee you that if I actually answer that you'll throw up." I told her, the smile on my face not entirely forced.
Rune stepped into my lab, trailing her fingers over my equipment, her fingers twitching as she marked everything she passed. I was fairly sure that wasn't a sign of aggression, just a thing she did, a habit that was probably very useful to her. If I could only telekinetically lift something after I marked it, I'd mark everything in my proximity as well.
"Come on, I saw you open up your brain, and it wasn't that bad. How much you gunna bet?"
"Five bucks." I told her. Moving the fire extinguisher on my bench over a bit so she couldn't see my arm as she came closer.
She looked at Stacy, the nurse who I had met when I first came to clinic.
I'd finally figured out exactly what Stacy and her mother were on, a personalized blend of anti-depressants and marijuana. They were both functional addicts, quite capable of performing complex, delicate tasks under the influence, but their incessant cheerfulness was really, really getting on my nerves. It would be pretty easy to tinker up something that altered their neural chemistry to be resistant to the drugs, make them actually face what the world had to offer, and I was seriously tempted to do just that.
Stacy shook her head, keeping my secret from the inquisitive gang member, and I decided that I'd leave her neural alterations for another day.
Rune scrunched up her brow in thought, eyed the nearby biowaste bin, decided she was more brave than scared, and held out her hand.
"Cheapskate, it's not a guarantee if that's all you're betting, shake on it." She told me.
I smiled, and shook her hand with my left, an awkward grip, she'd held out her right hand, but I wasn't being tricked that easily.
"Fine fine. I'm curious now. Show me what you're doing." Rune demanded.
I pushed the fire extinguisher away. I'd get Stacy to put that back on the wall now, we were past the point where it might be needed, the battery had been successfully installed, and honestly, the chances of it exploding into flame had been incredibly remote anyway.
Rune stared at my right hand. She went a little pale, but she didn't look away, slowly accustoming herself to the sight.
"That's not… too bad. I mean, I think I can see your bones, I guess those are tendons, but it's not bleeding or anything, and I know you've turned your pain off. You owe me five bucks. And an explanation, that looks like a really complicated thingy-mabob. Why have you cut your hand up like that?"
"I'm installing a tazer." I told her, getting back to work on the circuitry. "We're past the hard part, the battery is installed in my radius and ulna, the two bones in the forearm. They won't produce blood cells anymore, but I've artificially boosted production for the rest of my body, so that's fine. The tricky part was making it so that the battery could bend and flex, like normal bone marrow."
"So now you're building the tazer itself?" Rune asked, eying the deep holes in my wrists. I had the tech to heal those up nice and quick though, without scarring. I was a pessimist, but I didn't want to go that emo.
"Yep. I want to be able to take someone out with a touch, so I've run the wires up my hand, into my fingers, I just need to make sure I can't electrocute myself, add a charging port, which is going to go near my elbow, and then make sure my body won't reject it every time Othala heals me."
Rune frowned.
"That's pretty cool. Just to let you know, if you prank me with that I'm going to mark your shirt and throttle you with it."
"Of course. This is for fighting, not pranks." I told her seriously.
"Heh, so serious, for someone with the name Mayhem you spend way too much time locked in a lab." Rune said, turning her eyes away from my very delicate operation and spying a swivel chair. She collapsed into it theatrically, squiggled with her finger on the seat, and then lifted it with her power, tilting it and raising it into a sort of semi-hammock transport.
"All right. Where's my money." She demanded impishly.
I gestured vaguely in the direction of my wallet with my left hand, I kept it near the door, though why I bothered to keep cash in it was beyond me. I had a budget now, several thousand dollars a month, and an initial bonus to get me started, but of course I spent that through the empire. I talked with Victor about what I needed, and he got it for me. Scrounging for old computers at the dump was a thing of the past.
The new availability of resources, plus the extra time I had now that I wasn't going to school anymore, meant that I was catching up with my power. I wasn't there yet, but I was close. I'd rebuilt my mask, with wifi and new tinkertech microphones for listening in on far away conversations. I'd rebuilt my boots, and I was nearly finished with an improved version of my jetpack, I just needed to wait for my forges to finish smelting some of the more exotic elements, and for the reinforcements to my ribcage to set properly.
My old jetpack had been stolen from me. The new one would be a part of me. The sub-dermal braces would double as high grade body armor for my torso, the legs would be detachable, just in case I needed to fit in with the rest of society. I'd narrowed the legs and made them more flexible, to the point where it seemed more accurate to call them arms, then swapped out the four reactors I used to keep in the legs themselves, for two more effective ones that were going to be built into my back. There would be a couple of large, obvious lumps near my spine, but their profile was low enough to be covered by a shirt, my ribcage was tough enough to support the weight, and I could increase skin growth in the area, to prevent the flesh being pulled too tight and splitting.
Combing two of my tech trees like this was… interesting. I didn't have an actual blueprint for what I was doing, just a couple of other blueprints, and just enough skills to be able to work the two together. The end result wouldn't be quite safe as the original design, but I'd already modified the original design to explode on command, so that wasn't saying much.
In another week or so I should have enough energy to unlock a blueprint that would teach me how to directly run energy from the new reactors to the tazer in my hand, rather than rely on the batteries in my bones. That would be handy, the fully charged tazer only had enough energy for three bursts under normal conditions, then it needed a recharge.
I would have put off installing it until after I could run the tazer from the reactors, but I needed an excuse to open the hand up. You see, my espionage tree had born wonderful fruit.
But it didn't pay to think about that. Step one to a successful infiltration, think like you're one of them. Construct a personality, think how they want you to think, and trust yourself enough to pull back from the brink when the time comes. I'd very nearly done that literally, but the Mayhem protocol left me close enough to a Dissociative Identity Disorder as it was, so no thank you powers, I'd keep my brain re-writing to emotion manipulation.
I finished assembling the electronics in my hand, filled the fluid canisters very carefully, and then sealed the skin back up.
Rune rifled through my wallet for a while, complained loudly that I didn't have the right change, and collected a twenty. I let her. I'd learned not to argue, she had this way of floating above me and nagging until she got her way.
She floated over to my computer next, and I groaned inwardly. I built it myself, and of course I built as much processing power as I could into the thing. I wasn't a computer tinker by any means, but I had some basic knowledge, enough to make it slightly better than top of the line. When I built a fast computer though, I did it so I could perform complex calculations, run simulations for me, that sort of thing. I should never have tried to distract Rune with it.
She complained that it still couldn't run Crysis on max settings. I complained that she was cluttering my computer with unnecessary junk. Somehow it turned into an argument about aliens, which she won.
I don't know how she did that, but I do know that if I ever argued with her again, I wasn't doing it after I stayed up till five AM tinkering.
My flesh was knitting nicely when I heard the singing. Sweet, young. Familiar.
"The toe bone's connected to the, knee bone,
The knee bone's connected to the, hip bone,
The hip bone's connected to the, spine bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!"
It felt like ice going down my spine to hear that, familiar as it was.
"The fuck? What is this Mayhem?" Rune asked, floating rapidly away from the screen.
"One of the few videos of the only other living 'wet' tinker at work." I said, as casually as I could manage. I hadn't deleted that video simply because I didn't need to. Watching it could be justified, and trying to hide that I was looking up information about my sister might have been suspicious. Not that they knew she was my sister. We only casually resembled each other, and the PRT hadn't announced that fact, probably trying to prevent a panic.
I'd probably have to announce it myself soon. I couldn't leave Riley much longer. She was my sister. My responsibility. One way or the other, I planned to free her soon.
At first my plan had been to track the Nine down, attack them in a small town somewhere, where there would be less collateral damage. The only problem with that was the other members of the Nine. They were dangerous, not many of them would know my face, and I doubt that Jack described me to them, and then said, 'hey, I've got something special planned for this kid, bring him to me when you see him.' It would be just my luck if I attacked the Nine, and was killed on the outskirts of whatever town they were attacking by a patrolling Shatterbird or Siberan. No, I needed them to come to me. Needed Jack to stay true to his promise. Needed my sister nearby. There would be more collateral this way, but considering how many people the Nine had killed over the years, it would be small in comparison.
"Well, that was incredibly disturbing." Rune said, the computer shutting itself off as a pencil she'd been twirling shot towards the power button. She was looking far more green now than she had been when she was inspecting my arm.
I shrugged, staying silent and focused on my work.
"You're in a mood. Normally you tell me off when I don't shut your computer down properly." Rune told me.
"Perhaps I've just given up?" I told her, dipping my hand into a pre-prepared tub of chemicals that would prevent scars from forming, and aid in cell growth. I didn't really need Othala, although I had booked her in for when I installed the generators in my back. That would save me a significant amount of time.
"Hmm, nope. There's something going on. What's on your mind May? You can tell me." Rune demanded.
I winced internally. I did not like being called May, and Rune could never know, or it would be the only thing she ever called me.
"I guess I'm still annoyed that my blackmail didn't work out." I told her.
I had managed to scavenge a few brief scenes from my visor, but nothing that would be a huge PR disaster for them. The information on Sophia bullying Taylor was now nearly useless. The PRT had officially arrested their wayward Ward, and the 'Ongoing Investigation' into the matter was now closed. It had been startling, how quickly a startled Piggot could move.
A payout to the Heberts, a very carefully worded press statement, a small spree of arrests.
Part of me was still furious with Taylor, accepting a payout and a moving to Arcadia instead of going to the media. The hush money had probably been quite good, the main instigators of her torment were lined up to go to Juvie once sentencing was complete, and I'm fairly sure that Sophia's case worker was also serving jail time, but she could have used this to wreck the PRT, instead of signing a NDA with her father and just… letting it go.
"Yeah, annoying, but that's the PRT for you. They got the PR part down to an art. Only thing they're really good at." Rune said. "You need to forget about it, find something to take your mind off it. Uncle Krieg has got a bunch of Earth Aleph moves, and we just got a new wide-screen. You should come around tonight. I've invited Alabaster too, us newbie's got to stick together."
"I have to finish my generators. They're at a crucial stage." I told her.
Rune glanced at Stacy, who was silently tidying up the bench I'd been using for surgery, cleaning and disinfecting it with alcoholic swabs.
"You can tell me what to do, and I'll keep your forges running. They look pretty simple." Stacy said with a bright smile.
OK, I take it back. Her drug problem was going to be solved this afternoon. I just needed an excuse to strap her to the operating table so I could inject the right chemicals into her brain.
"It's not simple, it's really complicated. These are exotic forms of matter beyond the understanding of modern science!" I told them both.
Heh. Another argument that I had already lost.
Last edited:
apeljohn
Non-Player Character
- Location
- Earth Aleph
And he calls himself a Tinker. All he needs to do is ask how she'll handle it if the strangelets start eating baryonic matter, or something equally technobabbly.
Real Tinkers can always find an excuse to stay in the lab.
And we're reading on the edge of our seats, so it all works out perfectly!
Enjoy'd.
Anyway always good to see Sophia, Emma and Madison meet the bottom of a bus.
I'm honestly looking forward to Taylor's reaction to the PRT only helping her because another Parahuman blackmailed them.
Don't worry I'm sure Coil will use their own camera's against them in this case. Especially if you become an infamous member of the E-88 or become the one to kill the Slaughterhouse Nine.
- Location
- italy
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
It's probably the graphics card.I see what you did there
- Location
- The Internet?
Sorry I'm late getting back to you. Other stuff, you know how it is.
Good update, as usual!
feels like it should be: Real name: Zoey Macrel.
Or: Her real name was Zoey Macrel.
The repeated use of 'that' seems a bit awkward/clunky. Try: it wasn't that bad.
Or: that wasn't so bad.
Or: that wasn't too bad.
you're
too
another British-ism. In American English, that's a person. You'd want to substitute it for 'aid.' Then again that's up to you.
If it's a question it needs a question mark, unless she's being flat/deadpan, and even then it wouldn't hurt.
Good update, as usual!
feels like it should be: Real name: Zoey Macrel.
Or: Her real name was Zoey Macrel.
The repeated use of 'that' seems a bit awkward/clunky. Try: it wasn't that bad.
Or: that wasn't so bad.
Or: that wasn't too bad.
you're
too
another British-ism. In American English, that's a person. You'd want to substitute it for 'aid.' Then again that's up to you.
If it's a question it needs a question mark, unless she's being flat/deadpan, and even then it wouldn't hurt.
Jackercracks
In a British accent
- Location
- England
This shows great promise. I think I will enjoy it very much.
RazorSmile
ROB Used To Be A Knife Missile
What's his problem with Stacy? So she's on drugs, big deal. Why does it bother him so much?
... ah. Hypocrisy. Of course. "We condemn most in others that which we recognize in ourselves."
... ah. Hypocrisy. Of course. "We condemn most in others that which we recognize in ourselves."
The Stormbringer
Worm Fanfic & Crack Connoisseur
- Location
- Spaaaaace~!
Stacy seems borderline Stepford-y. Maybe that's what bugs him? Or the fact that she's genuinely cheerful all the time, where he knows he's faking it.
TheLurker
Random Omnipotent Lazy-As-Fuck Being
- Location
- The space beyond the stars
okay, gonna be honest, I did NOT expect this to be as well-written as it is. Watched.
I have to be honest though, current prediction is mayhem winds up on the wrong end of a jack slash specialty 'talk' and the S9 gains a new tinker.
That would actually be a pretty good story honestly. And the potential for extremely creepy brother/sister shenanigans with Riley is pure GOLD.
I have to be honest though, current prediction is mayhem winds up on the wrong end of a jack slash specialty 'talk' and the S9 gains a new tinker.
That would actually be a pretty good story honestly. And the potential for extremely creepy brother/sister shenanigans with Riley is pure GOLD.
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Vaalintine
Wild Wondorous Wolfalope
Rune running her hands all over a Tinker's shit while they're Tinkering isn't something he should be letting pass, especially since he's sticking it into his body. It's practically letting them shove a killswitch into him.
Also, are we going to see anything from the PRT? Given that he pretty much told Miss Militia "I can only be a Villian now, because the PRT have already decided I am one" and implied this wasn't the first time Piggot had done as such I can't imagine she'd just let it be swept under the rug.
Also, are we going to see anything from the PRT? Given that he pretty much told Miss Militia "I can only be a Villian now, because the PRT have already decided I am one" and implied this wasn't the first time Piggot had done as such I can't imagine she'd just let it be swept under the rug.
- Location
- The Internet?
For the first part, it's likely she only has a limited amount of things she can 'tag' and the 'tags' likely have a fairly short duration.
He's not exactly brushing it off. He says he'd do as much. Besides it's not like he's betraying them right then and there. He also mentions it's just the equipment, not the stuff getting implanted in him. One would figure that Rune is Manton Limited anyway. We see her affect rocks, cars, clothes, containers. Never people. Odds are fleshy stuff and things inside bodies are going to be off limits to her.
As for the second...
Also, he did kind of kill a guy, and "It wasn't my fault because I turned off my higher reasoning" probably won't fly as an excuse.
1.8
- Location
- Australia
The ring smelt slightly of blood, there was human blood in there, but it wasn't all human. There were a few other species that I couldn't identify without dipping into the Animal Augmentation tree. I could make some guesses, the trees were closely intertwined, but really the only fighting animals popular in the Bay were dogs and cockerels, so my investigative nose wasn't telling me anything my brain couldn't figure out.
Did you know that intimidation is a separate emotion to fear? It's actually tied in pretty closely to respect, and my recent attempts to focus my neural modifications did leave me open to intimidation. Not fully, there were still a lot of fear aspects tied up in intimidation, and I wasn't feeling those. No, what I got when I looked at Hookwolf wasn't anything to do with fear, it was just a strong desire not to have to fight him.
… Whelp, too bad about that. Sorry emotions. You're the reason I'm here in the first place, so you don't get a say.
You see the Slaugherhouse just got a new member. One of Heartbreaker's daughters, she was calling herself Cherish.
Hatchet Face, the member she'd replaced, he wasn't really someone I anticipated being a problem to my future plans. If I was anything other than a tinker, definitely, but while my power might stop working in his field, but my tech wouldn't. I basically trumped him by the simple expedient of being me. Yay, one member of the Nine whose primary power couldn't kill me horribly, and whose secondary brute toughness I could hopefully avoid!
But no, they had to go and replace him with a Master whose estimated range was frickin terrifying. As this wasn't hard enough already.
Cherish was a particular threat to me, because she might be able to tell Jack what I was planning. Maybe not exactly what I was going to do, but what I was feeling. I could turn some emotions off, but turning off all of them would just leave me an unmotivated psychopath. Jack was smart and cautious, if Cherish told him what I was feeling, and that included feeling… I don't know, resigned and determined…
So I needed anti-Master tech, stat. There was some further up the Neural Enhancement branch. Stuff that could monitor and perhaps even shield my brain from interference by an outside source. The problem was that the tech was a lot higher up the branch than I had climbed. Several months of energy higher, at least at my current rates. So I needed to collect energy more quickly.
"What's the geek doing here?" Cricket asked.
I nodded to her, but addressed Hookwolf, going up to him and putting out my hand for him to shake.
"I'd like to learn how to fight, and Victor told me that this was probably the best place for that." I told him.
Actually Victor had offered to teach me himself, it just hadn't been combative enough for my power. He was a good teacher, he stole his teaching skills from the best I'm sure, but an afternoon of being carefully taught how to properly move just didn't give me more energy than normal. Getting him to suggest this place took a bit of work, actually. I'd had to insinuate that I got better ideas after a fight, which he seemed to buy. I still didn't want to share the exact details of my powers with anyone.
Hookwolf smiled, took my hand and casually ground the bones together. I didn't wince. I came prepared, and my pain was currently sitting on a barely perceptible two percent. I was relying on the enhanced understanding of my own body that Human Augmentation supplied to make sure I didn't rupture anything.
"You want to learn to fight huh? You think that you've got what it takes to tussle with the Empire's front-line? Well… everyone gets a chance to prove themselves, but this isn't your schoolyard boy. This is the real thing. You watch a fight first, if you're still around afterwards, we'll see what you've got."
I nodded.
It would probably be a bad idea to introduce myself to the rest of the group now. I'd have to wait until I won a fight or something. On the other hand, I couldn't afford to wait too long, too much familiarity meant I couldn't shake their hands in a nice, casual manner.
Hookwolf whistled at two men, whose names I never bothered learning, and who I thought of as Eagle Head Baldy and Blonde Man. They smirked at each other, got into the ring, and started punching.
No countdown. No lead-up. No gloves.
I tried not to think about the fact that I'd be in there soon, and let my power analyze the fight.
Testicular hemotoma. Frontal cephalohemotoma. Rib fractures. Scalp hemotoma and concussion. More rib fractures.
And we had a win… nope, the loser was going for a beer bottle.
Facial lacerations and glass foreign bodies.
"How often does Othala come around here?" I asked Cricket, who was watching with a smirk as Stormtiger leaped into the ring and smashed the loser to the ground, grinding the shards of the glass bottle into his hand. Apparently hitting the winner in the face with a glass bottle wasn't actually allowed by the rules. The winner was going over to his buddies, who were beating him on the back and… just ripping the glass out of his face. Wonderful. No wonder so many of these idiots had scars.
"Prissy bitch couldn't handle this shit." Cricket said with a smirk.
I nodded. Right. No, wait! Not right. How the hell did the Empire have any soldiers left? Part of me thought that maybe this was a bad idea as I stood up. I ignored that part of me. Since when had I ever had good ideas?
"You done here?" Cricket asked.
"No. I'd like to use my tech though. As a trial, and because I need to learn to fight with it. It's implanted, so I doubt I'll ever be without it."
"Sure. No killing." Cricket said, sounding bored.
I nodded, gulped to make them think that I was actually capable of feeling fear, and vaulted over the low, raised wall that surrounded the ring.
Before I got my power I was thin as a weed, with the physical fitness of your typical panic-attack prone shut-in. I was still thin, but over the last week I'd been starting to explore some of the lower level Human Augmentation options. I had access to some fairly decent tinkertech steroids, but I couldn't use them without first figuring out how it would effect the chemical balance in my brain. Some of the stuff I'd done up there was decidedly non-standard, and while I could normally counter the side effects of my drugs with careful monitoring, I needed a few test subjects before I could really be sure.
No, what I was working with now was even lower on my trees than that. A week of the perfect exercise schedule and power selected health foods.
God it was annoying. It would have been so much simpler if I could just build a new body, but breaching the Espionage tree, and my work on my jetpack, and my sudden need for anti-master tech meant that it would be a long time before I climbed that high.
Hookwolf held up a hand, silencing the crowd.
"Who's ready to go easy on the new kid?" He grated out.
Huh. Well, I guess Kaiser really did want to keep a tinker around, probably warned Hookwolf not to scare me off. Good to know in a way, but I don't think that this would be the best way to get energy.
A couple of men raised their hands.
Hookwolf pointed at one.
"Donald. You're up. Show him why we're the ones Kaiser can actually rely on."
Donald was huge. Towering over me by half a foot, and broader in the shoulders.
There was no setup to the fight. No starting noise or sound, he vaulted the barrier and punched me in the gut.
I gasped for breath, reached around to zap him with my tazer fingers, and he brushed my hand aside as casually as swatting a fly, then grabbed my collar.
I grabbed his arm, released the electricity. His body started twitching immediately, and it took a fair bit of my focus and coordination not to fall over with him.
There was silence, a few glares, and I was starting to wonder if Cricket was wrong about weapons being allowed when Hookwolf barked a laugh.
"Guess the new kid has teeth after all."
Apparently when Hookwolf laughs, everyone else laughs with him.
I chuckled as well, wasting the second charge on my tazer fingers by holding them up in a V and making a visible burst of energy crackle between them.
"You um, don't need to worry about losing, or anything. I'm a parahuman, I need to test my powers. Sorry if that's sort of cheating." I said, grinning in a way that was obviously far to cocky.
"You hear that boys. He wants a test!" Hookwolf yelled. "Have we got any volunteers."
Everyone in the room raised their hands.
Right. I was going to need more than a tazer for this. Fortunately, I had more.
Not the jetpack. That was the sort of thing that would break pretty easily in a fight, and it had it's own targeting software, I didn't need to learn to use that. No, I needed to learn how to fight in a melee, just in case I couldn't nail something from a distance with my jetpack's kinetic bursts. So, instead I'd retooled the thruster into a weapon, and built one into my left hand.
It didn't quite fit. I needed to make myself a chunky bracer to contain the generator, which meant I could only activate the kinetic pulses while I had the bracer on, but the exterior of the bracer was made of the hardest substance I could create, so it could block things fairly well, and I'd then tucked a series of small scalpels coated in sedative into the bracer itself, where I could draw them quickly with my right hand if I needed to.
As soon as I had the time I was going to streamline the thing, at the moment it was a gray monstrosity, but it was functional, and while I was wearing the bracer the output port on my palm was fully capable of acting as a thruster, or an adjustable kinetic pulse weapon.
Hookwolf selected three men, and they leaped into the ring. I blew one back out with a wide pulse of kinetic energy. I could have dampened the blow-back, got around Newton's third law by releasing the energy as light to be converted only when it struck someone. Instead I allowed it to spin me, planning to use my momentum to quickly turn to the next attacker.
That was a mistake. I misjudged the amount of force my hand was absorbing. My arm was nearly wrenched from it's socket, I spun twice, and fell in an undignified lump.
Then I was kicked.
Then I was punched.
I got off pretty lightly actually. One jaw fracture, but other than that, nothing but bruises.
Hookwolf called this fight once he decided that I was down, and all three men backed off instantly, even the one who had only just picked himself up and got back into the ring from my blast.
"Well little geek. How did your gadgets fare?" Hookwolf asked.
I shook my head to clear it, and stumbled to my feet.
"Not too bad, I think. I was the stupid one. Look's like I've got a lot to learn. I'll ask again, would you mind teaching me?"
Hookwolf looked me up and down. I pushed slightly at my cut lip with my tongue, making blood slowly trail down my chin. I liked being able to turn off pain. It made you look pretty badass without making you suffer for it.
"If you can take the lessons, you can learn." Hookwolf announced.
I felt my small reserve of energy. It had been empty when I came in. I smiled.
"Thanks, I'll be taking you up on that." I said.
There were a few howls of appreciation from the audience. I shook the hands of the men who had been fighting me, but stayed in the ring.
"I have something else to test before I go, if you don't mind."
Hookwolf shrugged.
"Your bruises. This is as good an entertainment as any." He told me.
I nodded. One way or another, I was going to have to use the Mayhem Protocol again. One day I'd be desperate enough to throw away my ability to reason in exchange for a combat advantage. Hell, I was planning on it.
Last time had been a disaster, but ignoring what had caused that disaster wouldn't change that it happened, and it wouldn't help me stop it from happening again. I'd revised it a bit, tried to give my moral compass a guiding hand in how the Protocol fought, but I still didn't have much data at all from the Protocol in action. I knew what it should do, but the protocol was designed to be adaptive, organic in nature and very capable of growth.
I made sure my new, extremely tough, mask was recording everything, and sending that recording over a hacked cell network to my personal server.
"Right, this time, if you could keep people coming until I fall, or until five minutes is up, I'd appreciate it. I won't really be… myself, it's… well it's a sort of combat personality I'm working on. You'll see. Mayhem. Objectives: Survival, non-lethal and non-permanent take-downs to everyone who enters the ring. Five minutes. Activate."
Did you know that intimidation is a separate emotion to fear? It's actually tied in pretty closely to respect, and my recent attempts to focus my neural modifications did leave me open to intimidation. Not fully, there were still a lot of fear aspects tied up in intimidation, and I wasn't feeling those. No, what I got when I looked at Hookwolf wasn't anything to do with fear, it was just a strong desire not to have to fight him.
… Whelp, too bad about that. Sorry emotions. You're the reason I'm here in the first place, so you don't get a say.
You see the Slaugherhouse just got a new member. One of Heartbreaker's daughters, she was calling herself Cherish.
Hatchet Face, the member she'd replaced, he wasn't really someone I anticipated being a problem to my future plans. If I was anything other than a tinker, definitely, but while my power might stop working in his field, but my tech wouldn't. I basically trumped him by the simple expedient of being me. Yay, one member of the Nine whose primary power couldn't kill me horribly, and whose secondary brute toughness I could hopefully avoid!
But no, they had to go and replace him with a Master whose estimated range was frickin terrifying. As this wasn't hard enough already.
Cherish was a particular threat to me, because she might be able to tell Jack what I was planning. Maybe not exactly what I was going to do, but what I was feeling. I could turn some emotions off, but turning off all of them would just leave me an unmotivated psychopath. Jack was smart and cautious, if Cherish told him what I was feeling, and that included feeling… I don't know, resigned and determined…
So I needed anti-Master tech, stat. There was some further up the Neural Enhancement branch. Stuff that could monitor and perhaps even shield my brain from interference by an outside source. The problem was that the tech was a lot higher up the branch than I had climbed. Several months of energy higher, at least at my current rates. So I needed to collect energy more quickly.
"What's the geek doing here?" Cricket asked.
I nodded to her, but addressed Hookwolf, going up to him and putting out my hand for him to shake.
"I'd like to learn how to fight, and Victor told me that this was probably the best place for that." I told him.
Actually Victor had offered to teach me himself, it just hadn't been combative enough for my power. He was a good teacher, he stole his teaching skills from the best I'm sure, but an afternoon of being carefully taught how to properly move just didn't give me more energy than normal. Getting him to suggest this place took a bit of work, actually. I'd had to insinuate that I got better ideas after a fight, which he seemed to buy. I still didn't want to share the exact details of my powers with anyone.
Hookwolf smiled, took my hand and casually ground the bones together. I didn't wince. I came prepared, and my pain was currently sitting on a barely perceptible two percent. I was relying on the enhanced understanding of my own body that Human Augmentation supplied to make sure I didn't rupture anything.
"You want to learn to fight huh? You think that you've got what it takes to tussle with the Empire's front-line? Well… everyone gets a chance to prove themselves, but this isn't your schoolyard boy. This is the real thing. You watch a fight first, if you're still around afterwards, we'll see what you've got."
I nodded.
It would probably be a bad idea to introduce myself to the rest of the group now. I'd have to wait until I won a fight or something. On the other hand, I couldn't afford to wait too long, too much familiarity meant I couldn't shake their hands in a nice, casual manner.
Hookwolf whistled at two men, whose names I never bothered learning, and who I thought of as Eagle Head Baldy and Blonde Man. They smirked at each other, got into the ring, and started punching.
No countdown. No lead-up. No gloves.
I tried not to think about the fact that I'd be in there soon, and let my power analyze the fight.
Testicular hemotoma. Frontal cephalohemotoma. Rib fractures. Scalp hemotoma and concussion. More rib fractures.
And we had a win… nope, the loser was going for a beer bottle.
Facial lacerations and glass foreign bodies.
"How often does Othala come around here?" I asked Cricket, who was watching with a smirk as Stormtiger leaped into the ring and smashed the loser to the ground, grinding the shards of the glass bottle into his hand. Apparently hitting the winner in the face with a glass bottle wasn't actually allowed by the rules. The winner was going over to his buddies, who were beating him on the back and… just ripping the glass out of his face. Wonderful. No wonder so many of these idiots had scars.
"Prissy bitch couldn't handle this shit." Cricket said with a smirk.
I nodded. Right. No, wait! Not right. How the hell did the Empire have any soldiers left? Part of me thought that maybe this was a bad idea as I stood up. I ignored that part of me. Since when had I ever had good ideas?
"You done here?" Cricket asked.
"No. I'd like to use my tech though. As a trial, and because I need to learn to fight with it. It's implanted, so I doubt I'll ever be without it."
"Sure. No killing." Cricket said, sounding bored.
I nodded, gulped to make them think that I was actually capable of feeling fear, and vaulted over the low, raised wall that surrounded the ring.
Before I got my power I was thin as a weed, with the physical fitness of your typical panic-attack prone shut-in. I was still thin, but over the last week I'd been starting to explore some of the lower level Human Augmentation options. I had access to some fairly decent tinkertech steroids, but I couldn't use them without first figuring out how it would effect the chemical balance in my brain. Some of the stuff I'd done up there was decidedly non-standard, and while I could normally counter the side effects of my drugs with careful monitoring, I needed a few test subjects before I could really be sure.
No, what I was working with now was even lower on my trees than that. A week of the perfect exercise schedule and power selected health foods.
God it was annoying. It would have been so much simpler if I could just build a new body, but breaching the Espionage tree, and my work on my jetpack, and my sudden need for anti-master tech meant that it would be a long time before I climbed that high.
Hookwolf held up a hand, silencing the crowd.
"Who's ready to go easy on the new kid?" He grated out.
Huh. Well, I guess Kaiser really did want to keep a tinker around, probably warned Hookwolf not to scare me off. Good to know in a way, but I don't think that this would be the best way to get energy.
A couple of men raised their hands.
Hookwolf pointed at one.
"Donald. You're up. Show him why we're the ones Kaiser can actually rely on."
Donald was huge. Towering over me by half a foot, and broader in the shoulders.
There was no setup to the fight. No starting noise or sound, he vaulted the barrier and punched me in the gut.
I gasped for breath, reached around to zap him with my tazer fingers, and he brushed my hand aside as casually as swatting a fly, then grabbed my collar.
I grabbed his arm, released the electricity. His body started twitching immediately, and it took a fair bit of my focus and coordination not to fall over with him.
There was silence, a few glares, and I was starting to wonder if Cricket was wrong about weapons being allowed when Hookwolf barked a laugh.
"Guess the new kid has teeth after all."
Apparently when Hookwolf laughs, everyone else laughs with him.
I chuckled as well, wasting the second charge on my tazer fingers by holding them up in a V and making a visible burst of energy crackle between them.
"You um, don't need to worry about losing, or anything. I'm a parahuman, I need to test my powers. Sorry if that's sort of cheating." I said, grinning in a way that was obviously far to cocky.
"You hear that boys. He wants a test!" Hookwolf yelled. "Have we got any volunteers."
Everyone in the room raised their hands.
Right. I was going to need more than a tazer for this. Fortunately, I had more.
Not the jetpack. That was the sort of thing that would break pretty easily in a fight, and it had it's own targeting software, I didn't need to learn to use that. No, I needed to learn how to fight in a melee, just in case I couldn't nail something from a distance with my jetpack's kinetic bursts. So, instead I'd retooled the thruster into a weapon, and built one into my left hand.
It didn't quite fit. I needed to make myself a chunky bracer to contain the generator, which meant I could only activate the kinetic pulses while I had the bracer on, but the exterior of the bracer was made of the hardest substance I could create, so it could block things fairly well, and I'd then tucked a series of small scalpels coated in sedative into the bracer itself, where I could draw them quickly with my right hand if I needed to.
As soon as I had the time I was going to streamline the thing, at the moment it was a gray monstrosity, but it was functional, and while I was wearing the bracer the output port on my palm was fully capable of acting as a thruster, or an adjustable kinetic pulse weapon.
Hookwolf selected three men, and they leaped into the ring. I blew one back out with a wide pulse of kinetic energy. I could have dampened the blow-back, got around Newton's third law by releasing the energy as light to be converted only when it struck someone. Instead I allowed it to spin me, planning to use my momentum to quickly turn to the next attacker.
That was a mistake. I misjudged the amount of force my hand was absorbing. My arm was nearly wrenched from it's socket, I spun twice, and fell in an undignified lump.
Then I was kicked.
Then I was punched.
I got off pretty lightly actually. One jaw fracture, but other than that, nothing but bruises.
Hookwolf called this fight once he decided that I was down, and all three men backed off instantly, even the one who had only just picked himself up and got back into the ring from my blast.
"Well little geek. How did your gadgets fare?" Hookwolf asked.
I shook my head to clear it, and stumbled to my feet.
"Not too bad, I think. I was the stupid one. Look's like I've got a lot to learn. I'll ask again, would you mind teaching me?"
Hookwolf looked me up and down. I pushed slightly at my cut lip with my tongue, making blood slowly trail down my chin. I liked being able to turn off pain. It made you look pretty badass without making you suffer for it.
"If you can take the lessons, you can learn." Hookwolf announced.
I felt my small reserve of energy. It had been empty when I came in. I smiled.
"Thanks, I'll be taking you up on that." I said.
There were a few howls of appreciation from the audience. I shook the hands of the men who had been fighting me, but stayed in the ring.
"I have something else to test before I go, if you don't mind."
Hookwolf shrugged.
"Your bruises. This is as good an entertainment as any." He told me.
I nodded. One way or another, I was going to have to use the Mayhem Protocol again. One day I'd be desperate enough to throw away my ability to reason in exchange for a combat advantage. Hell, I was planning on it.
Last time had been a disaster, but ignoring what had caused that disaster wouldn't change that it happened, and it wouldn't help me stop it from happening again. I'd revised it a bit, tried to give my moral compass a guiding hand in how the Protocol fought, but I still didn't have much data at all from the Protocol in action. I knew what it should do, but the protocol was designed to be adaptive, organic in nature and very capable of growth.
I made sure my new, extremely tough, mask was recording everything, and sending that recording over a hacked cell network to my personal server.
"Right, this time, if you could keep people coming until I fall, or until five minutes is up, I'd appreciate it. I won't really be… myself, it's… well it's a sort of combat personality I'm working on. You'll see. Mayhem. Objectives: Survival, non-lethal and non-permanent take-downs to everyone who enters the ring. Five minutes. Activate."
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Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
I always get a bad feeling whenever you use Mayhem Protocol.
Legion1771
The God
And then nothing happens and everyone stares at him funny.
Jackercracks
In a British accent
- Location
- England
Oooo, this is fun!
- Location
- South Africa
Really enjoying how this story is going.
- Location
- PR
You really need to shorten your activation voice command.
Mayhem Activate or Online
Or Mayhem Time if you want to sound as if you are in a crap shounen manga
Add numbers for time in Mayhem state if you want but in a fight nobody is going to sit down and let him say all that.
Maybe even make it so that he doesnt even need voice commands, after all he implanted shit on his head to See
Mayhem Activate or Online
Or Mayhem Time if you want to sound as if you are in a crap shounen manga
Add numbers for time in Mayhem state if you want but in a fight nobody is going to sit down and let him say all that.
Maybe even make it so that he doesnt even need voice commands, after all he implanted shit on his head to See
The Stormbringer
Worm Fanfic & Crack Connoisseur
- Location
- Spaaaaace~!
Mayhem really seems like a great way to build up power charge. Fighting a room full of brawlers? That should get him a good amount of juice, though likely not as much as against the PRT and Protectorate.
1.9
- Location
- Australia
I reached for a splint as I examined the broken leg. The break was quite clean, a bit of bone glue, a bit of cell grown formula, something to take down the swelling, and the world would have one more E88 skinhead walking just fine in three days.
I replayed the video of my fight, matched one of the faces on the recording to the one in front of me. Mayhem had nicked him with a scalpel, a simple, casual flick of his wrist, then casually fired a burst from the kinetic thruster in his palm into the man's shinbone to keep him down while the sedative worked it's way through his system. Ouch.
At least I'd been smart enough to bring medical supplies this time. The car that drove me here was filled with enough tinkertech medical gear to start a small hospital. On the other hand… I glanced over at Cricket. I think Mayhem had the medical supplies in mind when he defined 'non-permanent.'
I'd already reviewed the footage of my fight with Cricket. Mayhem didn't seem affected by her ability to disorient opponents, which wasn't surprising. He was fully capable of ignoring my inner ear, and calculating balance based of visual input or simple math. Still, her skill with her blades and the damage to my eardrums had apparently been enough to piss him off, judging by the broken humerus in her left arm, broken radius and ulna in her right arm, broken tibia in her left leg, and dislocated patella in her right leg.
I'd already put casts on her, and the painkillers I'd prescribed had a very strong calming effect, so hopefully she wouldn't try to kill me as soon as she woke up.
At the very least the leg casts would give me a chance to get away.
There were a few other injured gang members, but with the leg of the man I'd literally been standing on fixed, I instead fast forwarded the footage of the fight to try and figure out if Hookwolf and Stormtiger were going to be as pissed as Cricket.
I knew I hadn't been able to beat Hookwolf, because I woke up with a bunch of whirling razorblades in my face, but when I told him that I was awake again, and that the fight was over, I hadn't really been able to read his grunts one way or the other. At least he'd changed back to his more human form. Stormtiger had also been standing, but he'd been swaying slightly, and he was now over by the sturdy crate that was doing double duty as a bar, drinking a bottle of something cold and probably alcoholic.
Let's see… looked like after I took down Cricket both Hookwolf and Stormtiger had agreed to 'give me a real challenge' and entered the ring together. There had only been thirty seconds left on the clock at that point, so it wasn't surprising that there wasn't a clear victor. Hookwolf was able to grow metal over his flesh quickly enough to block Mayhem's use of the scalpels, the tazer had been out of charge by then, and Stormtiger managed to maintain a protective shield of air whenever Mayhem threw a scalpel his way, but Mayhem still had access to the kinetic pulse weapon built into my left hand, and he'd been using it.
Hmm, looked like Mayhem had managed to nearly take down Stormtiger, he just hadn't been able to make it stick with Hookwolf after him. One shot that Stormtiger had only partially dodged did dislocate Stormtiger's arm… I threw a glance at the man, who had nearly finished draining a bottle of beer. He'd popped the arm back in himself, an amateur job, I'd need to give him something to prevent future stiffness. Probably best to leave that for later, I had a lot more broken limbs in need of attention first.
My own body was holding up surprisingly well. Sprained and strained tendons, ligaments and muscles, numerous fractures in my right hand when I punched someone with more than the recommended level of force, but I think that Mayhem was getting better at preserving me. Nothing I couldn't fix within a day or so, or work through while my pain was set this low.
Oh joy, Hookwolf was coming back. I look up at him, but kept working, arraying the sprints, tying them to his ankle. I gestured to the end of the man's leg.
"Would you mind tugging on his foot please?" I asked.
Hookwolf grunted, tugged on the ankle gently while I kept my grip on the knee. I kept up pressure until the bone snapped back into place, bound the top of the leg quickly, then injected the correct chemicals. One down, seven to go. Mayhem seemed to like the 'sleepy slash' and 'leg blast' formula.
"Pretty good fight." Hookwolf said eventually, almost begrudgingly.
"Thanks." I told him. My power certainly seemed to like it.
"You've got the instinct, the savagery, but there's too much… what's that word? Where you don't do anything but what you need to do?"
"Um… economy of motion?" I asked.
"Doesn't have anything to do with money, but maybe. When you moved, it wasn't to do anything except attack. I don't think you threw a feint in the whole fight, and it wasn't just that, you didn't circle your target for a better angle, you didn't move on the spot to warm up muscles, nothing but attack attack attack. I still got a bit I can teach you." Hookwolf said.
Mayhem was adaptive, it would probably learn on it's own with a bit of time. Still, I don't think I could safely let Mayhem out anywhere else. This wasn't really a controlled environment, but it was close. I just needed to be careful with how I phrased my commands.
"Um, thanks. I'll definitely take you up on that." I most certainly would, I'd be able to unlock anti-master mental modifications in a little over a week, provided I did this every night…
Which I wouldn't be able to do without Othala's co-operation. I was a miracle worker, but I wasn't that good at fixing myself back up. I wouldn't be comfortable doing this again till the day after tomorrow, maybe Thursday if some of the people who had been fighting me wanted a second round.
"Those words you say, when you want to turn on the murder machine, " Ouch. Not the term I would use for it, if only because it was disturbingly accurate, "they're a weakness. You can't say all that in the middle of a fight." Hookwolf pointed out.
"I know, but they're a bit like the safety on a gun." I told him. "It's like… I could trigger the Mayhem Protocol with my neural implant, but if I did then it could become a case of not thinking of pink elephants, and I could trigger it by accident. The Mayhem Protocol and the lethal settings on my kinetic pulse weapons all require voice activation, so I can't just receive some sort of shock, and pull the trigger accidentally, as it were. So I have to say the words. I can shorten it, sort of, you know how there's… I can't say it, but a bit of setup where I describe what I want it to do?"
Hookwolf nodded.
"Well, I can say that before I go into a fight, set some parameters, and then it will activate as soon as I say, 'activate.' Pretty simple."
"So when you just fought is that you, or isn't it?" Hookwolf asked.
He actually seemed to respect what Mayhem was capable of, so saying it wasn't wouldn't be my best bet. I did see myself as separate from the Protocol, but…
"Try to think of it as me, if I exchanged my higher thought functions for a combat thinker power." I told him. He looked a little confused, but he nodded, and helped me set another bone.
I zoned out a little, medical technology wasn't strictly speaking my forte, but I could fix broken limbs in my sleep regardless. Instead of focusing on the carnage I'd caused, I looked through the next few options on my tech trees. Let's see, I wanted to continue up my Neural Enhancement branch, and it was currently my highest branch, holding the most complicated technology I had currently unlocked.
I spotted something vaguely familiar, I think I'd seen it in a few other trees and branches. A micro-matter-manipulator. Not anything to do with Neural Enhancement specifically, just a tool needed to make the next stage of neural implant.
A very versatile tool though, I would need it for almost any tree eventually, and I had just enough energy to buy it. I was still inspecting the new schematic while I fixed the final broken bone into place. Hookwolf picked up on my annoyance.
"Something bothering you?" He asked me.
I shook my head and sighed.
"Sort of. I just had an idea for a really, really cool tinkertech thing, but now that I think about it, it's outside my budget. I could make something that gives a permanent anti-master effect, but I'd need a couple of million to build it."
Not counting whatever the implant itself ended up costing. I was still a long way from buying anti-master implant tech, this was literally just one of the tools I would need. Hookwolf whistled, and smirked.
"Heh, well, have fun convincing Kaiser you need the money. Might be better to shelve the idea for now. Chinks and Merchants are blessedly free of fucking Masters." Hookwolf said with a shrug.
I nodded, and began treating myself. There were a few chemicals that could increase the rate at which fractured bones healed, the only real problem was keeping the bones in my hand completely still while the fractures re-knit. This was going to be a fairly complicated cast.
I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, and I was caught off guard when Cricket sat up.
Whoops, I sort of meant to have left by now. That's the trouble with that sedative, fast acting, but it works it's way out of the system too quickly.
She looked around, saw me, looked at the casts on her legs, and unsteadily levered herself to her feet. Which was impressively stupid considering both her arms were in casts as well. She fumbled around and found her throat mike, putting it to her electo-larynx. I could upgrade that pretty easily.
"You. Mayhem!" She yelled.
I wondered if I should make a run for it. She managed to do the intimidation thing almost as well as Hookwolf, despite my lack of fear and the state of her body.
"Um, yes?" I said, working quickly. I couldn't move just yet, needed to finish wrapping my hand first, or I'd loose dexterity until I re-broke things.
"You, you dance really well." She told me, swaying unsteadily.
If I had eyes, I would have blinked.
"Um, thank you?" I said.
"Stormtiger, he dances well too, but he likes pretty girls, not girls like me. Do you like girls like me?" Cricket asked.
In my desire not to be killed for breaking her limbs, I might have given her too much morphine. She had managed to pick up one of her kama, and she was waving it around happily. Why? Why would she say that while waving a small scythe at me?
"I…"
My mind went blank. My power showed me a blueprint for a knife-proof formal suit, and I got the bizarre feeling that it wanted me to spend more time around the crazy, scythe wielding woman. Probably for the additional conflict. That feeling did not help my mental state.
In the end the way she was standing on a broken leg was the thing that popped into my mind, so I drew one of my two remaining scalpels and walked over to her, carefully nicking a tiny vein in her arm just above the cast. The sedative was potent, that was all that I needed to do.
"As your doctor, I advise strict bed rest. No dancing for at least three days." I told her as she collapsed.
Then I ran the fuck away.
I replayed the video of my fight, matched one of the faces on the recording to the one in front of me. Mayhem had nicked him with a scalpel, a simple, casual flick of his wrist, then casually fired a burst from the kinetic thruster in his palm into the man's shinbone to keep him down while the sedative worked it's way through his system. Ouch.
At least I'd been smart enough to bring medical supplies this time. The car that drove me here was filled with enough tinkertech medical gear to start a small hospital. On the other hand… I glanced over at Cricket. I think Mayhem had the medical supplies in mind when he defined 'non-permanent.'
I'd already reviewed the footage of my fight with Cricket. Mayhem didn't seem affected by her ability to disorient opponents, which wasn't surprising. He was fully capable of ignoring my inner ear, and calculating balance based of visual input or simple math. Still, her skill with her blades and the damage to my eardrums had apparently been enough to piss him off, judging by the broken humerus in her left arm, broken radius and ulna in her right arm, broken tibia in her left leg, and dislocated patella in her right leg.
I'd already put casts on her, and the painkillers I'd prescribed had a very strong calming effect, so hopefully she wouldn't try to kill me as soon as she woke up.
At the very least the leg casts would give me a chance to get away.
There were a few other injured gang members, but with the leg of the man I'd literally been standing on fixed, I instead fast forwarded the footage of the fight to try and figure out if Hookwolf and Stormtiger were going to be as pissed as Cricket.
I knew I hadn't been able to beat Hookwolf, because I woke up with a bunch of whirling razorblades in my face, but when I told him that I was awake again, and that the fight was over, I hadn't really been able to read his grunts one way or the other. At least he'd changed back to his more human form. Stormtiger had also been standing, but he'd been swaying slightly, and he was now over by the sturdy crate that was doing double duty as a bar, drinking a bottle of something cold and probably alcoholic.
Let's see… looked like after I took down Cricket both Hookwolf and Stormtiger had agreed to 'give me a real challenge' and entered the ring together. There had only been thirty seconds left on the clock at that point, so it wasn't surprising that there wasn't a clear victor. Hookwolf was able to grow metal over his flesh quickly enough to block Mayhem's use of the scalpels, the tazer had been out of charge by then, and Stormtiger managed to maintain a protective shield of air whenever Mayhem threw a scalpel his way, but Mayhem still had access to the kinetic pulse weapon built into my left hand, and he'd been using it.
Hmm, looked like Mayhem had managed to nearly take down Stormtiger, he just hadn't been able to make it stick with Hookwolf after him. One shot that Stormtiger had only partially dodged did dislocate Stormtiger's arm… I threw a glance at the man, who had nearly finished draining a bottle of beer. He'd popped the arm back in himself, an amateur job, I'd need to give him something to prevent future stiffness. Probably best to leave that for later, I had a lot more broken limbs in need of attention first.
My own body was holding up surprisingly well. Sprained and strained tendons, ligaments and muscles, numerous fractures in my right hand when I punched someone with more than the recommended level of force, but I think that Mayhem was getting better at preserving me. Nothing I couldn't fix within a day or so, or work through while my pain was set this low.
Oh joy, Hookwolf was coming back. I look up at him, but kept working, arraying the sprints, tying them to his ankle. I gestured to the end of the man's leg.
"Would you mind tugging on his foot please?" I asked.
Hookwolf grunted, tugged on the ankle gently while I kept my grip on the knee. I kept up pressure until the bone snapped back into place, bound the top of the leg quickly, then injected the correct chemicals. One down, seven to go. Mayhem seemed to like the 'sleepy slash' and 'leg blast' formula.
"Pretty good fight." Hookwolf said eventually, almost begrudgingly.
"Thanks." I told him. My power certainly seemed to like it.
"You've got the instinct, the savagery, but there's too much… what's that word? Where you don't do anything but what you need to do?"
"Um… economy of motion?" I asked.
"Doesn't have anything to do with money, but maybe. When you moved, it wasn't to do anything except attack. I don't think you threw a feint in the whole fight, and it wasn't just that, you didn't circle your target for a better angle, you didn't move on the spot to warm up muscles, nothing but attack attack attack. I still got a bit I can teach you." Hookwolf said.
Mayhem was adaptive, it would probably learn on it's own with a bit of time. Still, I don't think I could safely let Mayhem out anywhere else. This wasn't really a controlled environment, but it was close. I just needed to be careful with how I phrased my commands.
"Um, thanks. I'll definitely take you up on that." I most certainly would, I'd be able to unlock anti-master mental modifications in a little over a week, provided I did this every night…
Which I wouldn't be able to do without Othala's co-operation. I was a miracle worker, but I wasn't that good at fixing myself back up. I wouldn't be comfortable doing this again till the day after tomorrow, maybe Thursday if some of the people who had been fighting me wanted a second round.
"Those words you say, when you want to turn on the murder machine, " Ouch. Not the term I would use for it, if only because it was disturbingly accurate, "they're a weakness. You can't say all that in the middle of a fight." Hookwolf pointed out.
"I know, but they're a bit like the safety on a gun." I told him. "It's like… I could trigger the Mayhem Protocol with my neural implant, but if I did then it could become a case of not thinking of pink elephants, and I could trigger it by accident. The Mayhem Protocol and the lethal settings on my kinetic pulse weapons all require voice activation, so I can't just receive some sort of shock, and pull the trigger accidentally, as it were. So I have to say the words. I can shorten it, sort of, you know how there's… I can't say it, but a bit of setup where I describe what I want it to do?"
Hookwolf nodded.
"Well, I can say that before I go into a fight, set some parameters, and then it will activate as soon as I say, 'activate.' Pretty simple."
"So when you just fought is that you, or isn't it?" Hookwolf asked.
He actually seemed to respect what Mayhem was capable of, so saying it wasn't wouldn't be my best bet. I did see myself as separate from the Protocol, but…
"Try to think of it as me, if I exchanged my higher thought functions for a combat thinker power." I told him. He looked a little confused, but he nodded, and helped me set another bone.
I zoned out a little, medical technology wasn't strictly speaking my forte, but I could fix broken limbs in my sleep regardless. Instead of focusing on the carnage I'd caused, I looked through the next few options on my tech trees. Let's see, I wanted to continue up my Neural Enhancement branch, and it was currently my highest branch, holding the most complicated technology I had currently unlocked.
I spotted something vaguely familiar, I think I'd seen it in a few other trees and branches. A micro-matter-manipulator. Not anything to do with Neural Enhancement specifically, just a tool needed to make the next stage of neural implant.
A very versatile tool though, I would need it for almost any tree eventually, and I had just enough energy to buy it. I was still inspecting the new schematic while I fixed the final broken bone into place. Hookwolf picked up on my annoyance.
"Something bothering you?" He asked me.
I shook my head and sighed.
"Sort of. I just had an idea for a really, really cool tinkertech thing, but now that I think about it, it's outside my budget. I could make something that gives a permanent anti-master effect, but I'd need a couple of million to build it."
Not counting whatever the implant itself ended up costing. I was still a long way from buying anti-master implant tech, this was literally just one of the tools I would need. Hookwolf whistled, and smirked.
"Heh, well, have fun convincing Kaiser you need the money. Might be better to shelve the idea for now. Chinks and Merchants are blessedly free of fucking Masters." Hookwolf said with a shrug.
I nodded, and began treating myself. There were a few chemicals that could increase the rate at which fractured bones healed, the only real problem was keeping the bones in my hand completely still while the fractures re-knit. This was going to be a fairly complicated cast.
I wasn't paying as much attention as I should have been, and I was caught off guard when Cricket sat up.
Whoops, I sort of meant to have left by now. That's the trouble with that sedative, fast acting, but it works it's way out of the system too quickly.
She looked around, saw me, looked at the casts on her legs, and unsteadily levered herself to her feet. Which was impressively stupid considering both her arms were in casts as well. She fumbled around and found her throat mike, putting it to her electo-larynx. I could upgrade that pretty easily.
"You. Mayhem!" She yelled.
I wondered if I should make a run for it. She managed to do the intimidation thing almost as well as Hookwolf, despite my lack of fear and the state of her body.
"Um, yes?" I said, working quickly. I couldn't move just yet, needed to finish wrapping my hand first, or I'd loose dexterity until I re-broke things.
"You, you dance really well." She told me, swaying unsteadily.
If I had eyes, I would have blinked.
"Um, thank you?" I said.
"Stormtiger, he dances well too, but he likes pretty girls, not girls like me. Do you like girls like me?" Cricket asked.
In my desire not to be killed for breaking her limbs, I might have given her too much morphine. She had managed to pick up one of her kama, and she was waving it around happily. Why? Why would she say that while waving a small scythe at me?
"I…"
My mind went blank. My power showed me a blueprint for a knife-proof formal suit, and I got the bizarre feeling that it wanted me to spend more time around the crazy, scythe wielding woman. Probably for the additional conflict. That feeling did not help my mental state.
In the end the way she was standing on a broken leg was the thing that popped into my mind, so I drew one of my two remaining scalpels and walked over to her, carefully nicking a tiny vein in her arm just above the cast. The sedative was potent, that was all that I needed to do.
"As your doctor, I advise strict bed rest. No dancing for at least three days." I told her as she collapsed.
Then I ran the fuck away.
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