Awww, thanks for the clarification still. I mean-
*gasp*
Bow down to the sause giver!
orz
Starfinder (Worm/Starfinder RPG)
- Thread starter Bowlerhat Guy
- Start date
Bow down to the sause giver!
orz
I think the simplest way to help is by creating a Medicinal drug. A Vaccine provides 5 + Tier bonus to saving throws and lasts for a number of months equal to the Tier. He could make a Tier 1 Vaccine, which would last for 1 month, and provide a +6 bonus vs. Leukemia. He could also make a Recovery Aegis, to add another +1 to saving throws, and Replenigel Megavitamin provide a +2 circumstance bonus to Fort Saves vs. Disease.
Sure, it's not a cure, but depending on how it works in the real world vs. game mechanics, it could lead to recovery. At the very least, it'd probably be better than whatever Dennis's dad is already taking.
There's actually a ton of interesting things he could make for the PRT, as there are lots of items for organizations. Boots that auto-ajust after being worn for 2 hours, holographic displays for logos, helmets that detect movement through walls, Replenigel Megavitam gives temp HP daily, and a Valor Medallion alone would be priceless for PRT Troopers.
And there's a couple neat 'bounty hunter' items he could make. Serum of Hibernation knocks people out for 2d4 days, a Diagnostic Lozenge tracks location for 20 hours, an Anykey reduces the difficulty of opening doors, a Warning Wire sounds an alarm when activated, a Truth Amplifier makes someone unable to lie for 5 minutes.
- Location
- New Zealand
All we know about the Merchants is that Squealer was an independent villain at the start of canon and only joined up around the time of the ABB rampage, and that they worked out of an old tourist shop that closed down a decade before canon (though we don't know how long after it closed that they started). Given the very high turnover rate of gangs in Brockton Bay, I don't think they would have been around for more than a few years, tops.
Also, as long as Science Dog uses those manipulator arms to pick up somebody's gun and start waving it around during the attack, I'm going to be happy.
Also, as long as Science Dog uses those manipulator arms to pick up somebody's gun and start waving it around during the attack, I'm going to be happy.
Shadow Archon
Protoss Preserver
- Location
- Louisiana
Is Science Dog an Invinicble reference?
That's the in-universe comic in Invincible. A shame they had to change it to Seance Dog in the show because of stupid licensing.
That's the in-universe comic in Invincible. A shame they had to change it to Seance Dog in the show because of stupid licensing.
- Pronouns
- They/Their/Them
- Pronouns
- He
Is Science Dog an Invinicble reference?
That's the in-universe comic in Invincible. A shame they had to change it to Seance Dog in the show because of stupid licensing.
Bonus points because Seance Dog is very clearly Doctor Strange but a Dog
okay, the fall out from this should be massive. Its PRT portable healing tech, the big three should be coming down on skidmark like the god of vengeance. There should be no way that skidmark of all people should have been able to get the info on this transport. I smell a rat name Thomas Clavert.
- Pronouns
- Masculine
Definitely. Skidmark would do this if he had enough Cocaine. But I fully expect Coil to have instigated this.
I expect Thomas is quite eager to kill or co-opt John right about now.
I also expect he is going to be found dead in his bed soon... which is really the best way to deal with him.
Shadow Archon
Protoss Preserver
- Location
- Louisiana
No. They shouldn't and they won't.
You're inflating the importance of both the healing tech and how reactionary the Triumvirate are. The Triumvirate is not the Justice League. Wards get attacked all the time across the country, and the Triumvirate can't babysit the entire Protectorate's junior division. It's just not logistically possible. Now, worst case scenario: Starfinder dies. Then you'd probably get some Protectorate cape backup, temporarily, as a reaction, mainly in case Skidmark gets away, but it's not going to be the big three together. They only all come together when it involves S-Class Threats, Cauldron business, or Endbringer fights. That is it.
Legend, seeing he's the closest, could probably reinforce the Bay on an emergency, but he'd be the only one of the three if any. More likely, you'd get the likes of Chevalier or Myrddin or some other non-triumvirate cape involved. Maybe even a few. New York, much like with their police and fire departments, has multiple branches of the Protectorate throughout the city-scape. You could easily have an entirely OC cape involved rather than the Triumvirate if that worst-case scenario happened.
I entirely disagree. Calvert's big villain plan is to take the Director's seat away from Piggot. Why would he want to kill an asset he's already going to own when he takes Piggot's position?
Unless Calvert feels like Starfinder is directly contributing to Piggot keeping her seat, I don't see why he'd go for the kill. Even then, if killing a Ward is meant to throw enough mud on Piggot to make her lose the Directorship, he could easily kill another Ward like Clockblocker, Kid Win, etc. if he sees Starfinder as a the stronger asset.
This can all be explained as "Skidmark see Tinker drugs on news. Skidmark gets dumb idea and immediately decides to do dumb thing. Watch Skidmark shoot himself in foot."
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Fluffy_serpent
a snake pretending to be human
ok, but you cannot deny that this attack will have negative consequences for the one who has carried it out / planned it, also I think you are underestimating the importance of healing tinker-tech since although it is not so important yet (once it is demonstrated how effective it is and how important it is if it can increase to the level that someone from the Triumvirate appears) if it is important enough so that if it is stolen the PRT takes out the big guns / takes off the child safety
Shadow Archon
Protoss Preserver
- Location
- Louisiana
Well of course it'll have negative consequences, but it's not "Call down the Protectorate cape equivalent of a nuke!"
Healing tinker-tech will matter strategically only if it can be mass produced. If Dragon learns she can produce a version of it and have it stocked in every PRT base nationwide? It'll be way way way more important than it is right now. Especially if that applies to the higher grade healing tech. Once/if he can build Regeneration Tables, which can resurrect people who have been dead up to 20 days, yeah, he'll be a very big deal that may have the Triumvirate show up, but not right now. Even in canon, Panacea's crazy healing powers didn't make her a national icon. She was still just a regional hero.
But yes, the PRT are probably going to not let this hang, and end the Merchants for good. They're a very minor gang at this point anyways, so it's not that destabilizing to the Bay if the hammer falls on them.
Bakkasama
There is always a greater fool
- Location
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Pronouns
- He/his
Eh, tinkertech can be built again. As long as the cape producing it is not hurt, it shouldn't be that bad of a response. There would still be one, but John is not very secretive about how easy it is for him to make the ampoules.
Surprise Round
- Pronouns
- He
The van spun around twice quickly, like we were inside a dry cycle in a laundry machine. The six troopers in the van with me and I all went tumbling through the air like rocks in a bag. Unfortunately for the troopers, humans were a lot less durable than stones, and as such, several of them bounced off the walls of the vehicle with sickening crunching noises that made me want to vomit. At first I tried to reach for anyone I could, to secure them to myself so my armor could take the brunt of the impact for them, but too late did I realize that as far as physics were concerned, my armor was just another hard object to bounce off of.
I watched in painful slow motion as my hand went out to try and grab someone, only for the tumbling motion to jerk them forward faster than I had been expecting - which resulted in me effectively punching them in the throat. The sealed container of healing serum, which in retrospect, should have been lashed to the floor, ping ponged around the small space with us, slamming into people with a force that my power was trying to calculate but that I really didn't want to know at the moment.
There was a lot of screaming, and a lot of pain - though for me it was more on the order of bruises than broken bones.
When the vehicle we were in finally stopped moving I pushed myself to my feet, and Merlin had the drone do the same. My armor was dinged up, but the damage was mostly superficial. The drone too, had suffered only minor damage to one of its limbs - something that would have crippled a dumber drone but that Merlin was easily able to compensate for.
The troopers were… not so okay. It might have been a differently story if they had all been strapped in properly, or if the barrel of tinkertech was secured, or if I hadn't been here, taking up half the space-
But all of those had happened. This was just supposed to be a trivial PR run. Nothing bad was supposed to happen. I had been surprised for weeks now at how decent the PRT had seemed at everything, and now the illusion was crumbling around me in the worst possible way.
"John. Focus." Merlin ordered me, instantly snapping me out of my dazed stupor.
Right. None of these people were dead yet. None of them had to die. I might not have been expecting trouble but I was still fully kitted out for it, and there was a barrel of healing crap right there.
"You take that side, I'll get this one." I rattled off, quickly pawing at my suit in order to get the inner compartment that held all my ampoules open.
"No sir. I will handle this - there are hostiles converging on the vehicle and backup is approximately two minutes away." The AI snapped back. The drone next to me whirred to life, and the teo manipulator arms on its back dislodged themselves from its spine, one holding a syringe-like weapon and the other a pistol. Simultaneously, I detected several scans of the men in front of me, as my custom microlab - a class feature of the Biohacker class - powered on inside the drones chassis.
This had the dubious effect of making its eyes glow bright blue, but more importantly, caused six different readouts to quickly flicker over my hub before Merlin squelched them, preventing me from seeing what state the men were in.
I grit my teeth, but accepted the reality for what it was. No amount of healing crap was going to help these guys if they got shot six more times while I was trying to help them.
Dimly, I wondered how the hell whoever had done this even had the wherewithal to determine which Van I was in, assuming I was even the target of this attack. It wasn't like there weren't half a dozen PRT cans roaming the city at any one moment in time, and while this one was headed towards the Hospital, almost any of the others could have been as well.
Setting the thought aside for the moment, I flipped on my shoulder mounted weaponry and turned towards the rear door of the vehicle, ignoring the way Merlin had the drone examine one man for a second before moving on to the next, injecting him with the fluid in one of his manipulators.
Here's something about me that might not be obvious from the way I typically interact with people. I have a temper. It takes a while to really and truly piss me off, and recently, I had been exposed to enough bullshit that the threshold for doing so had grown significantly taller - but when I was mad, I got really mad.
So understandably, when I heard movement outside the van doors, I didn't think exceptionally hard about what I was going to do. I scanned for heat signatures on the other side, pointed my guns at two of the over two dozen shapes that appeared in my vision, pushed my way out into the open, instantly plugging two of the nearby men with guns in the chest with sonic attacks.
The street outside was a mess. There were damaged vehicles and wounded people everywhere, probably owing to the three literal tanks that had plowed through the intersection we were in to get to us. Well, I called them tanks. My power was scanning them as troop transports, which made sense I guess, since they looked like someone had welded armor plating to a bunch of derelict school buses and then slapped a turret on top. Everything I knew and understood about physics told me these things shouldn't be as undamaged as they were by the collision we had just gone through, but I guess once again Parahuman bullshit was going to have to be the explanation, whether I liked it or not.
From each transport flooded a veritable horde of men, all of them dressed in ratty clothing and looking as strung out as it was possible to be and still remain conscious.
I had, once again, no idea what the hell was going on. To my knowledge the Merchants were kind of a bit player in the greater scheme of things in the city. They were the one gang with so little influence that no one was bothered if you tried to completely clean them up. There was no danger of them getting eaten up by the Empire or the ABB and throwing off the delicate balance of the city because they had nothing to do with that balance. By my estimate, there were probably more people here right now pointing guns at me than the core membership of the Merchants presently even had.
Something seriously did not add up about this.
In the split second between emerging and flooring the two guys nearest to me, I took the entire scene in, and tried to figure out what to do to keep as many people alive as possible. Sure, I could fling myself into most of these enemies with impunity, but there were alot of injured people nearby, and I couldn't be sure any of them would be safe from the crossfire. The turrets on each of the three nearby vehicles were also sort of a problem, in that they looked like they might actually fire rounds that could hurt me.
Merlin, bless his robotic soul - because yes machines had clearly defined souls in Starfinder - handily resolved some of that concern by firing a bolt from the shield projector built into the drone at me.
Shield Projectors were nifty little 'weapons' in that they… weren't weapons. You couldn't really use one to hurt someone if you tried, short of just gunbucking them with the thing anyway. Instead, anyone hit with a Shield Projector got well… a shield. A body hugging energy shield, to be specific. Typically Shield Projectors came as heavy weapons - fuck huge minigun sized devices that dispensed defenses to your allies. The one Merlin was using was the only pistol variant I could come up with, which gave it the unfortunate drawback of not being very strong. So, instead of girding me against hails of gunfire, each shield would hold against… I want to say maybe two bullets.
It wasn't ideal, but there also wasn't anything stopping my Drone from just continuously firing the thing at me either, which was why I had made the thing in the first place. I didn't need more dakka - I think hurting other people was probably the easiest most common aspect of my toolkit. No, what I needed, and what I had made, was a healbot. A Drone that would follow me around like a pet cleric, throwing shields and healing at me for the duration of a fight.
"Console this is Starfinder - everything is fucked." I spoke aloud, moving forward and hurling my hammer with Merlin granted accuracy at the turret of one of the vehicles while simultaneously bowling through several guys in a charging sprint that I hoped would put me between the other two.
As I ran, my shoulder mounted weaponry hummed with violence, picking out anybody who looked like they were going to try and take a hostage from the crash victims, or move towards the downed PRT van and pulverizing them with a staccato of thunder cracks that probably deafened anyone too close to me.
"Star Finder this is console, sit tight reinforcements are inbound. What is the status of your guard detail?" One of the PRT agents on the line answered. They didn't even bother letting whatever Ward was on duty today get involved.
"They're all fucked! I'm healing them but they aren't gonna be any help! I've got nearly thirty attackers here, looks like Merchants!" I screeched, catching my hammer and a hail of returning gunfire from practically every direction.
I guess the prospect of friendly fire didn't bother whoever was in those turrets. I was glad I had damaged the barrels on the first truck or this would have been a nightmare.
Well. More of a nightmare.
"Star Finder, remain in the van, I repeat, do not engage." My handler for the day ordered me.
"Oh we are so far past not engaging!" I replied, mustering the focus through the repeated concussive blows to my armor to cast daze on one of the turrets, then throwing my hammer at the other to try and damage it enough that it couldn't fire on me.
It… sorta worked. The guy in the turret had spun the barrels away from me in time to stop me from breaking them, but in the process had also allowed my sledge hammer to cave in the gunners compartment he was sitting in, pinning half his body to his chair.
There was a not insubstantial chance that guy was going to die, but if I was being honest I really didn't care at that exact moment.
Or so I liked to tell myself. I'm pretty sure I was going to hear his screams - which were audible even above the rapid crackling of thunder from my weaponry - in my nightmares for months.
With just the one turret left, and none of the nearby thugs willing to move closer to me, I started to wonder what exactly the plan was here. Without vehicular support I could handle all of these guys by myself, and with capes to defend said vehicles this entire attack felt like a waste of resources.
Stupid fucking me, tempting fate.
Almost the minute I thought it, something fuck huge loomed up from behind the first transport. I think the best way I could describe it was an earth elemental made out of car parts. The entire thing shifted and rumbled as it moved, picking up speed as it hurtled toward me. Too late, I noticed that where there were once several broken cars were now significantly smaller piles of junk, junk that was even now getting pulled toward the pile of metal and asphalt sprinting at me.
"Oh fuck you, you stupid little goblin man!" I screame just before the giant veritably bitch slapped me across the street, sending me hurtling through the front window of a convenience store to land inside the refrigerator in the back that held all the cold drinks.
"The troopers in the transport are stable. Engaging." Merlin informed me, the drone skidding into view in the hole I had made in the store front and blasting me with another shield before spooling up a new spell on my core.
Now, it should be noted that Merlin took his namesake very seriously. Where I only had a very minimal amount of time to dedicate to programming new spells, Merlin could be working on several at once without any notable strain. I estimated my library of castable spells was probably twice as many as a technomancer of an equivalent level should actually have - and whats more, unlike me, Merlin was really fucking good at picking out the right one to match the situation.
Hence, I barely even looked at the spell he'd queued up for me before casting it.
Merlin was my partner, and I trusted him.
The second the program was finished running, the giant outside - which was bending over to try and reach into the building after me - was covered in grease. Thick, black, oily, grease.
That was literally all the Grease spell did. It covered a ten foot radius in the stuff and let basic physics do the rest.
Predictably, the giant - who I presumed to be Mush, the Merchant whose power was becoming a trash golem - immediately slipped and fell over on what passed for its face. Merlin moved the drone to then leap atop the thing where he began savagely ripping at parts of it.
Meanwhile, I pushed myself to my feet and sprinted for the whole, pausing near the register to yell at the poor guy hiding behind it.
"Out the back! Go go go!" I urged him immediately before charging back into the fray myself.
"Console where the hell is my backup?!" I practically screamed through the aches and pains I was feeling, skidding to a halt just outside the store and punching my jump jets to fly over Mush before he could reach for me.
"I'm here." Armsmasters stern voice cut in, and with almost perfect timing, the roar of his motorcylce filled my ears and he skidded into view, stepping off the motorcycle while it was still in motion and perfectly utilizing his momentum to trip two guys in passing and slam a third into a wall when his vehicle slid to a halt just a bit to quickly for him to dodge.
Miraculously none of those people were severely injured, not that I actually cared at this point.
"No offence sir, but, just you?" I asked in concern as Mush managed to push himself to his feet, grabbing my drone and hurling it off him.
Merlin righted it in the air and landed with an awkward jerk on his three good limbs, stopping next to me.
"The Merchants attacked several PRT vehicles at the same time. The entire Protectorate has mobilized." He informed me evenly.
How the fuck- why the fuck- you know what? Fuck it. This was Coils' fault somehow. I don't know how, and I don't know why, but I'd have plenty of time to dig up proof later. As much as I'd like to think Piggot would believe if I told her to just take me at my word on the topic, I suspected the greater organization of the PRT as a whole. Especially since the Chief Director already knew about and was ignoring him. I think. Maybe.
One of the shit things about Coil was that the exact nature of his relationship with Cauldron eluded me - it was all jumbled up with the sheer amount of fanfiction I'd read over the years. So I couldn't remember if he was a Cauldron agent, or someone they cared about enough to cover for - or if he was just some asshole who bought his powers from them. I couldn't exactly pop a wikipedia page open to check - so I had to be cautious, and make sure all my bases were covered.
Didn't stop me from imagining wringing the anorexic fuckers neck though.
"Can you handle tiny over there?" I asked Armsmaster, which seemed to surprise him slightly. I don't know why. I could certainly take Mush down but it'd be close, and I'd probably end up killing him by accident in the process. I'd rather get to all the hurt civilians than waste my energy on that.
"Yes." He affirmed instantly.
Then we spun away from each other, and I started rushing toward the nearest injured person.
We got into a rhythm, me and Merlin. I'd lever any debris off of the people in the nearby cars while providing cover for the victims, he would rush in and heal them. Then we would use the shield projector and my bulk to protect them while they exited the scene. There were a few people who weren't conscious, and for those the best I could do was to heal them and leave them where they were.
I was dimly aware of Armsmaster battling behind me, but for all the shit I gave him, I had absolute trust in the man's capabilities. From the minute he had arrived, I was no longer concerned with winning - just with helping as best I could.
I could elaborate about things I did at that point, but I won't. The entire thing felt like a hazy fever dream, and at a certain point I think most of my higher brain function clicked off so that I wouldn't freak out everytime I had to pull a piece of glass out of someone's eye, or shove their guts back inside them while Merlin applied healing to them, or-
Yeah. I didn't want to thin about it.
At length, the sounds of battle died down, and I realized belatedly that there were no more thugs to down. Turning, I found Armsmaster standing triumphantly over the goblinoid pink form of Mush, and all of the Merchants present either having fled or been bludgeoned unconscious by my weapons.
"Star Finder, stand down." Armsmaster ordered of me once we caught sight of each other again. Honestly, I didn't know what he was talking about. I was just standing here.
At least thats what I thought, until Merlin directly took control of my cannons away from me - which forced me to recognize that they had long since run out of power, and were just pointed at the nearest downed Merchant, clicking uselessly as I repeatedly sent the command to fire.
"…right." I responded in a dull tone of voice I didn't really recognize from myself.
This was the first time I had really been in this kind of fight. Much like my encounter with Emma had forced me to reevaluate my stance on random patrols, right now I was absolutely horrified by the collateral damage surrounding me. It's one thing to jokingly think about Squealer and her invisible tanks driving around running people off the road, or to envision a huge epic cape fight in the streets. It's another thing entirely to see the results.
I think Armsmaster could see how shaken up I was too, because he didn't really make any further comment towards me. If he was a more socially inclined person himself, I think he would have tried to comfort me with words. Shockingly, how similar we were as people shone through here however - because instead, he just patted me on the shoulder once in passing, and said;
"You did the right thing. Nobody could expect more from you." Then he stalked off to start zip tying the downed men's hands together and disarming them.
And you know, while I knew objectively that he was right, that the only way I could have done better was to be an objectively worse person than all the criminals I had fought today - in my heart of hearts, there was still a little voice that wanted to rebuke the statement.
Because I expected more from me.
An hour later, in a new van that had arrived to pick me up before I could be swarmed by any inbound reporters, Merlin broke me out of my brooding with an update.
"You have a phone call from Victoria, sir." He offered.
I had never been more thankful for teenage drama before that moment. This was exactly the distraction I needed to avoid going into a depressed funk.
"Put me on Merlin." I requested, then started to speak when the sound of a phone being answered began to reverberate through my helmet.
No one else could hear it but me, which just goes to show that Tinkers easily top the charts as far as quality of life goes.
"Hey, Vic-" I started to greet the blonde only to be cut off by a panicked voice.
"Where are you?! Someone in your old suit shot Vicky with your blinding thing and-"
Someone fucking what?
"- and she flew into a wall and fell and her legs are all messed up and she's screaming and can't fly so I'm flying her to your stupid warehouse because this is your fault and you have to fix it!"
Amy was fucking what?
I watched in painful slow motion as my hand went out to try and grab someone, only for the tumbling motion to jerk them forward faster than I had been expecting - which resulted in me effectively punching them in the throat. The sealed container of healing serum, which in retrospect, should have been lashed to the floor, ping ponged around the small space with us, slamming into people with a force that my power was trying to calculate but that I really didn't want to know at the moment.
There was a lot of screaming, and a lot of pain - though for me it was more on the order of bruises than broken bones.
When the vehicle we were in finally stopped moving I pushed myself to my feet, and Merlin had the drone do the same. My armor was dinged up, but the damage was mostly superficial. The drone too, had suffered only minor damage to one of its limbs - something that would have crippled a dumber drone but that Merlin was easily able to compensate for.
The troopers were… not so okay. It might have been a differently story if they had all been strapped in properly, or if the barrel of tinkertech was secured, or if I hadn't been here, taking up half the space-
But all of those had happened. This was just supposed to be a trivial PR run. Nothing bad was supposed to happen. I had been surprised for weeks now at how decent the PRT had seemed at everything, and now the illusion was crumbling around me in the worst possible way.
"John. Focus." Merlin ordered me, instantly snapping me out of my dazed stupor.
Right. None of these people were dead yet. None of them had to die. I might not have been expecting trouble but I was still fully kitted out for it, and there was a barrel of healing crap right there.
"You take that side, I'll get this one." I rattled off, quickly pawing at my suit in order to get the inner compartment that held all my ampoules open.
"No sir. I will handle this - there are hostiles converging on the vehicle and backup is approximately two minutes away." The AI snapped back. The drone next to me whirred to life, and the teo manipulator arms on its back dislodged themselves from its spine, one holding a syringe-like weapon and the other a pistol. Simultaneously, I detected several scans of the men in front of me, as my custom microlab - a class feature of the Biohacker class - powered on inside the drones chassis.
This had the dubious effect of making its eyes glow bright blue, but more importantly, caused six different readouts to quickly flicker over my hub before Merlin squelched them, preventing me from seeing what state the men were in.
I grit my teeth, but accepted the reality for what it was. No amount of healing crap was going to help these guys if they got shot six more times while I was trying to help them.
Dimly, I wondered how the hell whoever had done this even had the wherewithal to determine which Van I was in, assuming I was even the target of this attack. It wasn't like there weren't half a dozen PRT cans roaming the city at any one moment in time, and while this one was headed towards the Hospital, almost any of the others could have been as well.
Setting the thought aside for the moment, I flipped on my shoulder mounted weaponry and turned towards the rear door of the vehicle, ignoring the way Merlin had the drone examine one man for a second before moving on to the next, injecting him with the fluid in one of his manipulators.
Here's something about me that might not be obvious from the way I typically interact with people. I have a temper. It takes a while to really and truly piss me off, and recently, I had been exposed to enough bullshit that the threshold for doing so had grown significantly taller - but when I was mad, I got really mad.
So understandably, when I heard movement outside the van doors, I didn't think exceptionally hard about what I was going to do. I scanned for heat signatures on the other side, pointed my guns at two of the over two dozen shapes that appeared in my vision, pushed my way out into the open, instantly plugging two of the nearby men with guns in the chest with sonic attacks.
The street outside was a mess. There were damaged vehicles and wounded people everywhere, probably owing to the three literal tanks that had plowed through the intersection we were in to get to us. Well, I called them tanks. My power was scanning them as troop transports, which made sense I guess, since they looked like someone had welded armor plating to a bunch of derelict school buses and then slapped a turret on top. Everything I knew and understood about physics told me these things shouldn't be as undamaged as they were by the collision we had just gone through, but I guess once again Parahuman bullshit was going to have to be the explanation, whether I liked it or not.
From each transport flooded a veritable horde of men, all of them dressed in ratty clothing and looking as strung out as it was possible to be and still remain conscious.
I had, once again, no idea what the hell was going on. To my knowledge the Merchants were kind of a bit player in the greater scheme of things in the city. They were the one gang with so little influence that no one was bothered if you tried to completely clean them up. There was no danger of them getting eaten up by the Empire or the ABB and throwing off the delicate balance of the city because they had nothing to do with that balance. By my estimate, there were probably more people here right now pointing guns at me than the core membership of the Merchants presently even had.
Something seriously did not add up about this.
In the split second between emerging and flooring the two guys nearest to me, I took the entire scene in, and tried to figure out what to do to keep as many people alive as possible. Sure, I could fling myself into most of these enemies with impunity, but there were alot of injured people nearby, and I couldn't be sure any of them would be safe from the crossfire. The turrets on each of the three nearby vehicles were also sort of a problem, in that they looked like they might actually fire rounds that could hurt me.
Merlin, bless his robotic soul - because yes machines had clearly defined souls in Starfinder - handily resolved some of that concern by firing a bolt from the shield projector built into the drone at me.
Shield Projectors were nifty little 'weapons' in that they… weren't weapons. You couldn't really use one to hurt someone if you tried, short of just gunbucking them with the thing anyway. Instead, anyone hit with a Shield Projector got well… a shield. A body hugging energy shield, to be specific. Typically Shield Projectors came as heavy weapons - fuck huge minigun sized devices that dispensed defenses to your allies. The one Merlin was using was the only pistol variant I could come up with, which gave it the unfortunate drawback of not being very strong. So, instead of girding me against hails of gunfire, each shield would hold against… I want to say maybe two bullets.
It wasn't ideal, but there also wasn't anything stopping my Drone from just continuously firing the thing at me either, which was why I had made the thing in the first place. I didn't need more dakka - I think hurting other people was probably the easiest most common aspect of my toolkit. No, what I needed, and what I had made, was a healbot. A Drone that would follow me around like a pet cleric, throwing shields and healing at me for the duration of a fight.
"Console this is Starfinder - everything is fucked." I spoke aloud, moving forward and hurling my hammer with Merlin granted accuracy at the turret of one of the vehicles while simultaneously bowling through several guys in a charging sprint that I hoped would put me between the other two.
As I ran, my shoulder mounted weaponry hummed with violence, picking out anybody who looked like they were going to try and take a hostage from the crash victims, or move towards the downed PRT van and pulverizing them with a staccato of thunder cracks that probably deafened anyone too close to me.
"Star Finder this is console, sit tight reinforcements are inbound. What is the status of your guard detail?" One of the PRT agents on the line answered. They didn't even bother letting whatever Ward was on duty today get involved.
"They're all fucked! I'm healing them but they aren't gonna be any help! I've got nearly thirty attackers here, looks like Merchants!" I screeched, catching my hammer and a hail of returning gunfire from practically every direction.
I guess the prospect of friendly fire didn't bother whoever was in those turrets. I was glad I had damaged the barrels on the first truck or this would have been a nightmare.
Well. More of a nightmare.
"Star Finder, remain in the van, I repeat, do not engage." My handler for the day ordered me.
"Oh we are so far past not engaging!" I replied, mustering the focus through the repeated concussive blows to my armor to cast daze on one of the turrets, then throwing my hammer at the other to try and damage it enough that it couldn't fire on me.
It… sorta worked. The guy in the turret had spun the barrels away from me in time to stop me from breaking them, but in the process had also allowed my sledge hammer to cave in the gunners compartment he was sitting in, pinning half his body to his chair.
There was a not insubstantial chance that guy was going to die, but if I was being honest I really didn't care at that exact moment.
Or so I liked to tell myself. I'm pretty sure I was going to hear his screams - which were audible even above the rapid crackling of thunder from my weaponry - in my nightmares for months.
With just the one turret left, and none of the nearby thugs willing to move closer to me, I started to wonder what exactly the plan was here. Without vehicular support I could handle all of these guys by myself, and with capes to defend said vehicles this entire attack felt like a waste of resources.
Stupid fucking me, tempting fate.
Almost the minute I thought it, something fuck huge loomed up from behind the first transport. I think the best way I could describe it was an earth elemental made out of car parts. The entire thing shifted and rumbled as it moved, picking up speed as it hurtled toward me. Too late, I noticed that where there were once several broken cars were now significantly smaller piles of junk, junk that was even now getting pulled toward the pile of metal and asphalt sprinting at me.
"Oh fuck you, you stupid little goblin man!" I screame just before the giant veritably bitch slapped me across the street, sending me hurtling through the front window of a convenience store to land inside the refrigerator in the back that held all the cold drinks.
"The troopers in the transport are stable. Engaging." Merlin informed me, the drone skidding into view in the hole I had made in the store front and blasting me with another shield before spooling up a new spell on my core.
Now, it should be noted that Merlin took his namesake very seriously. Where I only had a very minimal amount of time to dedicate to programming new spells, Merlin could be working on several at once without any notable strain. I estimated my library of castable spells was probably twice as many as a technomancer of an equivalent level should actually have - and whats more, unlike me, Merlin was really fucking good at picking out the right one to match the situation.
Hence, I barely even looked at the spell he'd queued up for me before casting it.
Merlin was my partner, and I trusted him.
The second the program was finished running, the giant outside - which was bending over to try and reach into the building after me - was covered in grease. Thick, black, oily, grease.
That was literally all the Grease spell did. It covered a ten foot radius in the stuff and let basic physics do the rest.
Predictably, the giant - who I presumed to be Mush, the Merchant whose power was becoming a trash golem - immediately slipped and fell over on what passed for its face. Merlin moved the drone to then leap atop the thing where he began savagely ripping at parts of it.
Meanwhile, I pushed myself to my feet and sprinted for the whole, pausing near the register to yell at the poor guy hiding behind it.
"Out the back! Go go go!" I urged him immediately before charging back into the fray myself.
"Console where the hell is my backup?!" I practically screamed through the aches and pains I was feeling, skidding to a halt just outside the store and punching my jump jets to fly over Mush before he could reach for me.
"I'm here." Armsmasters stern voice cut in, and with almost perfect timing, the roar of his motorcylce filled my ears and he skidded into view, stepping off the motorcycle while it was still in motion and perfectly utilizing his momentum to trip two guys in passing and slam a third into a wall when his vehicle slid to a halt just a bit to quickly for him to dodge.
Miraculously none of those people were severely injured, not that I actually cared at this point.
"No offence sir, but, just you?" I asked in concern as Mush managed to push himself to his feet, grabbing my drone and hurling it off him.
Merlin righted it in the air and landed with an awkward jerk on his three good limbs, stopping next to me.
"The Merchants attacked several PRT vehicles at the same time. The entire Protectorate has mobilized." He informed me evenly.
How the fuck- why the fuck- you know what? Fuck it. This was Coils' fault somehow. I don't know how, and I don't know why, but I'd have plenty of time to dig up proof later. As much as I'd like to think Piggot would believe if I told her to just take me at my word on the topic, I suspected the greater organization of the PRT as a whole. Especially since the Chief Director already knew about and was ignoring him. I think. Maybe.
One of the shit things about Coil was that the exact nature of his relationship with Cauldron eluded me - it was all jumbled up with the sheer amount of fanfiction I'd read over the years. So I couldn't remember if he was a Cauldron agent, or someone they cared about enough to cover for - or if he was just some asshole who bought his powers from them. I couldn't exactly pop a wikipedia page open to check - so I had to be cautious, and make sure all my bases were covered.
Didn't stop me from imagining wringing the anorexic fuckers neck though.
"Can you handle tiny over there?" I asked Armsmaster, which seemed to surprise him slightly. I don't know why. I could certainly take Mush down but it'd be close, and I'd probably end up killing him by accident in the process. I'd rather get to all the hurt civilians than waste my energy on that.
"Yes." He affirmed instantly.
Then we spun away from each other, and I started rushing toward the nearest injured person.
We got into a rhythm, me and Merlin. I'd lever any debris off of the people in the nearby cars while providing cover for the victims, he would rush in and heal them. Then we would use the shield projector and my bulk to protect them while they exited the scene. There were a few people who weren't conscious, and for those the best I could do was to heal them and leave them where they were.
I was dimly aware of Armsmaster battling behind me, but for all the shit I gave him, I had absolute trust in the man's capabilities. From the minute he had arrived, I was no longer concerned with winning - just with helping as best I could.
I could elaborate about things I did at that point, but I won't. The entire thing felt like a hazy fever dream, and at a certain point I think most of my higher brain function clicked off so that I wouldn't freak out everytime I had to pull a piece of glass out of someone's eye, or shove their guts back inside them while Merlin applied healing to them, or-
Yeah. I didn't want to thin about it.
At length, the sounds of battle died down, and I realized belatedly that there were no more thugs to down. Turning, I found Armsmaster standing triumphantly over the goblinoid pink form of Mush, and all of the Merchants present either having fled or been bludgeoned unconscious by my weapons.
"Star Finder, stand down." Armsmaster ordered of me once we caught sight of each other again. Honestly, I didn't know what he was talking about. I was just standing here.
At least thats what I thought, until Merlin directly took control of my cannons away from me - which forced me to recognize that they had long since run out of power, and were just pointed at the nearest downed Merchant, clicking uselessly as I repeatedly sent the command to fire.
"…right." I responded in a dull tone of voice I didn't really recognize from myself.
This was the first time I had really been in this kind of fight. Much like my encounter with Emma had forced me to reevaluate my stance on random patrols, right now I was absolutely horrified by the collateral damage surrounding me. It's one thing to jokingly think about Squealer and her invisible tanks driving around running people off the road, or to envision a huge epic cape fight in the streets. It's another thing entirely to see the results.
I think Armsmaster could see how shaken up I was too, because he didn't really make any further comment towards me. If he was a more socially inclined person himself, I think he would have tried to comfort me with words. Shockingly, how similar we were as people shone through here however - because instead, he just patted me on the shoulder once in passing, and said;
"You did the right thing. Nobody could expect more from you." Then he stalked off to start zip tying the downed men's hands together and disarming them.
And you know, while I knew objectively that he was right, that the only way I could have done better was to be an objectively worse person than all the criminals I had fought today - in my heart of hearts, there was still a little voice that wanted to rebuke the statement.
Because I expected more from me.
An hour later, in a new van that had arrived to pick me up before I could be swarmed by any inbound reporters, Merlin broke me out of my brooding with an update.
"You have a phone call from Victoria, sir." He offered.
I had never been more thankful for teenage drama before that moment. This was exactly the distraction I needed to avoid going into a depressed funk.
"Put me on Merlin." I requested, then started to speak when the sound of a phone being answered began to reverberate through my helmet.
No one else could hear it but me, which just goes to show that Tinkers easily top the charts as far as quality of life goes.
"Hey, Vic-" I started to greet the blonde only to be cut off by a panicked voice.
"Where are you?! Someone in your old suit shot Vicky with your blinding thing and-"
Someone fucking what?
"- and she flew into a wall and fell and her legs are all messed up and she's screaming and can't fly so I'm flying her to your stupid warehouse because this is your fault and you have to fix it!"
Amy was fucking what?
CedeTheBees
Probably high right now
- Location
- Somewhere
- Pronouns
- They/Them
And so the ripples finally start appearing
Dragonmaster150
Firstborn of Dragonkind
- Location
- Dragendolan: Land of the Dragon Kings
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think that blaming Coil is (probably) the correct decision here. I'm just trying to figure out who'd go shoot Victoria though. Looks like someone is trying to frame him for... something. Not sure what, or why, though.
Edit: Also, Amy can fly now apparently? When did that happen?
Edit: Also, Amy can fly now apparently? When did that happen?
HatsuZ
Phantom Thief
- Location
- Over the rainbow!
When her sister got hurt, ofc.
Vaolor
The Artificer
Well, looks like a butterfly has flapped its wings.
Now that we know that Amy has flying powers it's almost a given that she should also have some secondary ability related to her original power from Shaper.
I wonder how it may have expressed itself rather than biokinesis or her father's Osteokinesis.
Now that we know that Amy has flying powers it's almost a given that she should also have some secondary ability related to her original power from Shaper.
I wonder how it may have expressed itself rather than biokinesis or her father's Osteokinesis.
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You know, much as powers are sort of randomized on the spot and Amy getting exactly her canon power under different circumstances would be a total cop-out... I'd still have thought "something fucked up Vicky" would result in something more Marquis-ish.
Unless she, like, grew herself a set of wings on the spot. Maybe Amy got injured too?
Unless she, like, grew herself a set of wings on the spot. Maybe Amy got injured too?
- Location
- Philippines
I agree, the Shaper seems optimized for some kind of bio control in some form. Amy having some generic Alexandria Package is just as much of a cop out as her having the exact same powers as canon
- Pronouns
- He
Flying does not automatically mean she's an Alexandria package, I should like to point out.
- Location
- Philippines
Point. But I don't see how flight relates to Shaper unless Amy sprouted wings or something
- Location
- florida
Alright, interesting...
Also blinding thing? Odd.
Also who the hell is using his old suit?
Evaunit02mark1
S-s-smell the Prey, S-s-start the Hunt.
Either someone raided his old hideout (which shouldn't matter because when he signed on with the PRT he would have had to tell them anyway and they would have grabbed his stuff) or someone in the PRT stole it (which is even harder to believe because the moment someone steals tinkertech from the PRT that's when all hell would break loose) or Vicky is mistaken and someone has an ability like Starfinder but not the same suit.
I'm thinking it could be a Pre merchant Trainwreck or something similar.