PHASE 4: THE BREADSTICK APOCALYPSE
Rolls to dodge are in this post.
Ooooohhhh.... Nice Ship. This is great! I'll call it the... well I'll think of something. Never was good with names.
Grabbing another breadstick, I made my way to the entrance of the ship and I was greeted by a golem... well, that's nice? But how about I make it better? No offence rock golem guy. I wish for the crew to be cute girls!
You wish and wish and wish... but nothing happens.
...well, that's disappointing.
The golem captain looks up. "Incoming!"
You look up, to see
breadsticks zooming towards you.
Something clicks, and you move. In an astonishing display of acrobatics you didn't know you possessed, you dodge the breadsticks. After a while, you notice a pattern to the way they fall, and dodging them becomes trivial.
+1 to your next Roll to Dodge breadsticks.
You notice, while dodging, that your ship is firing back at the breadsticks, but the breadsticks seem to be absorbing the energy.
Then, in a flash of scarlet light, the breadsticks all vanish.
...oooookay...
...hey, wait a sec. Where'd the force field go?
I reached out and felt the remains of my harbingers of the apocalypse. Destroyed in but moments.
They will pay.
Just as they twisted my creations, I will twist their creations.
I felt the field of protection around the planet, and willed. I willed that the self-destructing breadsticks would coalesce in a sphere just under the shield, that when they blew up.. all would pay. Their pesky force-field would be turned against them.
A malicious smile grew across my face, as I envisioned a different apocalypse. Projectile-d breadsticks striking down upon everyone. Including their creator.
Thunder booms. Lightning crackles. The air grows tense, darkening around you.
You gesture dramatically, clenching your hand into a fist, and all the breadsticks vanish and reappear under the force field. You throw your hand down, and they all
hurtle down at high speeds, puncturing everywhere except where you are. Even if they counterattack, all they could hurt would be the breadsticks.
Given that you basically got to launch an attack on everyone without risk of hurting yourself or being counterattacked, no bonus for this action.
You blink, realizing that it's raining. You look up and...
oh. That thunder and lightning
hadn't just been dramatic. An evil-looking cloud is raining on you.
The moment you look up, it grins a lightning-y grin,
and the rain intensifies immensely.
You sputter and hack; a fair bit of water wound up in your windpipe. -1 to your next roll.
And then you notice that a flash of scarlet light has made all of your breadsticks vanish. Curses! Why can't they just let your apocalypses be?!
...well, at least the force field is gone now...
Many things happened at once, and the result was simply... Out of this world...
I expected only one shield generator, but instead, there were many. I guess I got lucky?
How about an energy shield for myself, then, like the ones the Protoss have? Just in case some other catastrophe occurs. Those falling moons had to come from somewhere, right?
You concentrate and... you feel something changing inside of you. You don't
look any different, but...
Your train of thought is interrupted when
a breadstick from the sky slams into you at 80 miles per hour.
You blink. You're... not hurt.
More breadsticks come, but you barely even feel them.
You might as well have been pelted with little balls of paper for how much damage is being done to you.
You have gained a skintight, invisible forcefield not unlike the one that gives Superman his invunerability. +1 to all Rolls to Dodge.
After a bit, the breadsticks vanish in a burst of scarlet light. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like your force field generators survived the hail. You might be able to repair them, though.
That blue haze looked an awful lot like some kind of energy field. A planetary shield? And where had that laser blast come from? Was everyone here a sci-fi geek except her?
The countdown which had just appeared seemed to add to that theory. Blowing up moons was a pretty sufficiently-advanced technology thing to do after all. At least that was what she'd gathered from Star Wars.
The girl stroked Nim. The planetary shield would take care of things, and she'd done some pretty cool things with her new power. Now it was time to greet her neighbors. Her parents had always said socializing was important.
But I'm going to do it my way, not theirs. Because I can.
"Hey, Nim," she said. "That's your name now, hope you like it... Uh, I don't know if you can hear or understand me, but I'm going to pinch off part of you, alright? Maybe change you a bit too. I don't think it'll hurt but let me know if it does, okay?"
Now for what she wanted. She wanted her pet cloud and all its offshoots to be able to find people for her. Any physical and mental changes are okay, as long as they don't become sapient or deviate recognizably from a cloud-like appearance or both. And she wanted them to find... whoever made those breadsticks appear, whoever made those moons and whoever set off their "self-destruct countdown". How did that even work?
Oh, and she wanted them to give those people water, plus a good shower. In fact, both at once would be fantastic.
Maybe Nim could also expand to cover her body fully, like a protective suit. But comfortably.
Too much? We'll see.
She closed her eyes and wished.
Nim starts vibrating, and before you know it, a piece shoots out from Nim and starts growing.
...wait. Is it supposed to be black...? Well, you
did want rain.
The cloud finishes its growth, then sprouts off two more, both dark. Finally, they cap off their growth with two eyes and a wicked grin formed from lightning.
They zoom off, thundering in a way that almost sounds like evil laughter.
...welp.
That can't be good.
Suddenly,
a hail of breadsticks falls on you and crapcrapcrap...
Whisper1 is dead.
Nim seems to have survived, though. Apparently it's hard for clouds to be hurt. Nim gets +1 to its next roll to dodge breadsticks.
The man grabbed a bread-stick and break it in Sharp Spear head "Don't laugh, my failure almost causes both of us to die" He looked to the bread-stick ring "we were lucky someone saved us"
The man looked to his hands well he could try that, trying to channeling all his energy to man started to run and let a scream "ROUTE 66!"
With luck that Stand he created a time ago would become real and take him and Sharp Spear to a safe place.
Your Stand appears, and you take your first five steps... and run into something. Blue, like the forcefield above the pla-
oh you've got to be kidding me.
You try again... and again... and again... and again...
And then you're interrupted by
breadsticks falling from the sky. Thankfully, inside your Stand, you're safe from the breadsticks. You get +1 to your next roll against breadsticks.
Unfortunately, Sharp Spear wasn't so lucky. He tripped out of the Stand's path right into the path of a breadstick.
Sharp Spear is Dead.
In a truly cruel twist of fate, the breadsticks all vanish shortly after that.
Well. This was shaping up to be one of the weirder dreams I've had. That'll teach me to go to bed after trying some of Lieutenant-Commander Cardiff's attempts at cooking. She really ought to leave that stuff to the ship's chef.
And I guess that my dream was picking up on my stomach troubles, because holy hell that is a lot of breadsticks.
Well, this was a dream right? And that meant that I could do anything, so I could do something about those. But not now. Maybe later, if I was still asleep.
Instead, I turned my mind to my crew. I sort of wished they were here to see this. This would definitely be a hell of a tale to share back at HQ.
Maybe Cardiff could come too. With any luck, she'll have improved in the cooking department on the trip over to... wherever this is.
I laughed to myself. Yeah, and maybe she'll be in a bikini, too. Hey, a man can dream, right?
EDIT: Oh dear.
You wish your crew here... but it seems like you got
some other people instead, and... oh dear. You were responsible for ruining one of their past raids, and they are
pissed at you.
They charge, but you dodge smoothly and start counterattacking with your bare hands. Thankfully, they aren't too skilled, but they are skilled enough to sustain only bruises.
The pirates withdraw, waiting for an opening...
...and then, suddenly,
breadstick interrupt!
Unfortunately, the breadsticks do what the pirates could not.
Mr. Egret has died.
And in a cruel twist of fate, the pirates are completely unscratched.
As I watched the moons disintegrate into breadsticks, my eyebrow twitched. That was it, I was SICK OF THESE FREAKING BREADSTICKS. Diving into my supply of parts, I began assembling a device to put a stop to these breadsticks once and for all. For the power plant I used a spare fusion core, I armed it with twin missile pods and a plasma gatling, and for propulsion I used an omnidirectional gravity drive.
It took a very short amount of time for me to complete my creation, and I grinned as its optic began to glow for the first time in its existence. I then informed my beautiful creation "Your directive is to destroy all breadsticks. ALL OF THEM! You are also to track down whoever's responsible for all this reality warping craziness and forcibly extract the information on how it works."
As my killbot zoomed off, weapons blazing, I got back to more down to earth concerns such as ensuring my long term survival. I'd burned through most of my spare parts, but if I was willing to cannibalize some of the ship's other systems I should be able to get the refinery and assembler up and running again...
The killboat zooms off, ready to do its deadly work, shooting breadsticks in its path...
And then the breadsticks fall and you try to dod-
-ark.
You slump to the ground, a breadstick embedded in your gut. You're not dead, but you can't take another hit like that...
I just write is Wounded.
Off in the distance, you see your killbot efficiently eliminating all the other breadsticks. You won't have to worry about those any more.
And then the one in your gut, as well as all the breadsticks your killbot hadn't destroyed yet, vanish in a flash of scarlet, as does the force field above you.
Kintsugi slowly grew more and more irritated as she scanned the ground and found nothing but breadsticks.
She heaved a sigh and turned her gaze toward the sky.
And found more breadsticks.
"ARGH! WHO WAS THE MORON THAT WISHED FOR SO MANY BREADSTICKS!" Kintsugi slapped her tail against the gold floor. "No more. I wish that all the breadsticks would just dissappear!"
Scarlet light begins to crackle around your hands, and, without knowing quite why, you whisper,
"No more breadsticks."
And in a flash of scarlet light, they all vanish, moments before some would have started falling on you. Weirdly, the force field vanishes too. Maybe the force field was also a breadstick?
+1 to your next Roll to Dodge breadsticks.
And then, a bear appears in front of you.
...what? No, seriously. What is a
bear doing here???
Dinac, staring out into the barren landscape, smiles. He then attempts to summon a brightly-painted tent with a silk rug. After all, he needs somewhere to sleep, and it wouldn't be some filthy ditch or place for peasantry.
A
tent appears, exactly the way you wanted it, with a silk rug inside. There's also... hmm. A note? It reads, "the carpet can fly".
You test it out, and indeed, the carpet responds to your thoughts and flies with abnormal agility. You can go
anywhere on this thing!
+1 to rolls involving your flying magic carpet.
But then, suddenly,
breadsticks start falling from the sky! What the he-arkglglglg!
Dinac is dead.
A single tear (A MANLY TEAR SHUT UP) rolled down my cheek as I saluted the sky. It was more beautiful than I ever could have dreamed.
Alright, alright, enough admiring the atmosphere. The natural majesty of the breadstick now visible to anyone and everyone, it was time to move on.
...and do what?
I'd changed myself.
I'd changed improved the planet.
I'd prevented the moons from going full Majora.
Only, looking at the sky, it seemed that someone else had involved themselves with that particular issue. Possibly multiple people.
Actually, one of these other people had probably been behind the whole moon situation in the first place.
Greeeat. Stuck in the same dream as some lunatic with no common sense and a weird fixation on inane objects. Moons. Seriously.
Well, I'd just have to teach him a lesson, wouldn't I? Ain't nobody messes with the celestial bodies of my dreams but me, buddy. It's go time.
Raising my arms in the air and cackling like a loon, I came up with my newest decree -
"I wish that whoever created those moons would be FLUNG INTO SPACE!"
THEY WANTED TO MESS WITH SPACE? THEY COULD DO IT BY HAND.
You gesture dramatically upwards and... you have no clue if it worked. But... you've got a feeling that it didn-!
Ack!
You just got nicked with a breadstick! -1 to your next roll.
Oh,
heck no! Nobody turns your beautiful breadsticks into weapons and gets away with i-!
Why are they all vanishing now?!
And then an evil storm cloud shows up and, with a wicked lightning grin,
starts raining on you. You get water up your windpipe. Ackhrkblblbl... -1 to your next roll.
And then a robot shows up?! What the heck is going on?!
"YOU WILL IDENTIFY HOW YOU WARPED REALITY, OR YOU WILL BE TERMINATED!"
Somewhat at odds with its stated purpose, it seems to be blasting lasers at you. But you thrust your hand forward, and the laser absorbs itself into your hand. You seem to have gained a slight resistance to lasers. +1 to your next Roll to Dodge the killbot.
In a better world I'd have perhaps allowed the forcefields to protect me. But I wasn't quite as confident in reality staying sane, and expecting those forcefields to stay in existence for long enough to protect me was conditional on things making sense.
In this place, not a good bet.
So instead, as I jogged off, I willed onto myself
Samus's suit of power armor.
Considering the kinds of hits this thing could take, I doubted some shrapnel would kill me....outright.
With a thought, the
Varia suit forms around you. It has a fair amount of energy and missiles, as well as much of her weaponry.
+1 to your next two Rolls to Dodge.
And not a moment too soon, as
breadsticks have begun falling from the sky. Using your Chozo agility, you dodge between the breadsticks adeptly.
After a moment, the hail stops, but your troubles aren't over yet. An evil-looking cloud has showed up, grinning a lightning-y grin and
raining tons of water on you, which for some reason, causes some damage to your suit. -1 to your next roll.
You notice the breadsticks vanishing in a flash of crimson and the force field breaking above you out of the corner of your eye, but you're more worried about the cloud right now.
The Texan considered the words of the holographic lady for a few minutes after she left, and briefly wondered about how to test his new power. One very FUN one popped up in his mind, but he wanted to keep his hypothetical power if he had it, so no lewdness involving the new benefactor. Remembering a group of Fanfictions, Hawke smiled. "IN A RANDOM UNIVERSE, A REDNECK SUMMONS A METAL EXTRACTOR!" Hawke said, dramatically pointing in a random direction "BY THE POWER VESTED IN ME BY THE HOT ALIEN BABE!!"
And poof, a
metal extractor appears!
You look up just in time to see
a hail of breadstick about to descend upon you. But you're not scared of them; you're Texan. You're too tough to go out to something as lame as
breadsticks. +1 to your next Roll to Dodge breadsticks.
Unfortunately, your new metal extractor isn't nearly as tough and is fairly badly damaged. You might be able to fix it up, though.
One might be led to believe animals had little interest in taste. They certainly don't make a very good show in our reckoning; raw meat, carrion meat, insect meat, green grub, and garden fare with little regard for food hygiene.
One might think that but this bear did not. Too much of a good thing is bad for you and the bear was just finding this out much to its chagrin (or what would pass as chagrin for a bear).
Its Mouth seemed to have a mind of its own and its Stomach seemed to agree. No matter how hard the bear pushed its Stomach pushed harder and its Mouth would retch.
Very well, the bear conceded, no more bread. But its time in the Forest taught it where food-not-from-Forest came. When came bread there came those creatures. And when came those creatures came food-not-bread!
It was only logical thought the bear with very little brain. And so it padded its way through a land of bread hoping to find its next source of food.
You trundle along, looking for humans. Well, more accurately, for their
pic-a-nic baskets.
You look up and see
more breadsticks falling from the sky. Nope, don't want those. You break into a run to avoid them...
And then, between one step and the next, you find yourself on a surface that shines
way too brightly, in front of something that almost looks like a human, but smells like metal.
Huh?
The being nodded to itself, pleased with its new form. Mobility and height achieved, the Angel observed the gathering of the breadsticks outside the shield that protected the world that he had entered. There was little need for him to interfere more, he thought to himself.
Now, with the end dealt with, the being could work more easily.
Still, the 'Lady's Protection' was going to end soon for the Angel, and with the result of the Moons, it may be a good idea to prepare a personal force field that could be cast to defend from harm.
And with the 'Grand Plan' that the Angel was preparing to invoke, that shield might be a 'Proof-of-Concept' to show that it might be possible.
So, hovering in place in the air and casting a glance at the breadstick rings, the Angel then focused inward and pushed energy outward, trying to cast a force-field spell to protect the caster from harm.
Death may be but an inconvenince, but still, it was time still spent that was most often better spent elsewhere.
You concentrate, and
a shield of white light surrounds you. +1 to your next Roll to Dodge.
Just in time, too, because not two seconds later,
a hail of breadsticks batters against your shield, shattering it. If you hadn't cast the spell, you'd be dead; as it is, you think your have some broken ribs.
Random Tale is Wounded.
You notice, through a pain-induced haze, that the breadsticks and the force field above you are vanishing.
EVENT: BREADSTICK KILLBOT
I Just Write has created a Killbot who is hunting down Shard, RadioactiveSpoon, and Silvan Eldar. At the end of each phase after this, the killbot will attack one of the three, selected at random, trying to forcibly extract information on how they managed to warp reality.
EVENT: I'M JUST A LITTLE BLACK RAIN CLOUD
Shard, Silvan Eldar, and RadioactiveSpoon are slowly being drowned by evil clouds that are outputting a lot more water than they ought to be able to. It's not doing much now, but if left unchecked, they may eventually flood the planet...
