When the occupants of the Iberez Ponzi Scheme get together and go to RWBY. We all know what one isekai traveler can do- what about nearly twenty?
The Great Mistake: A Discord Server's Isekai Adventure
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Week 1
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
In my defense, when I proposed the mass trip to the lake with my international collaboration of friends, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Everyone was throwing stuff in the bus, we were laughing, it was a great time. The Canadians had shown up in force, I had Winged arguing with me about mechanical solutions, and the weather was even cooperating for once.
Naturally, things went a little south when the bus driver ran a yellow and we got T-boned by a British Petroleum tanker. I'd make a joke about explosive Brexit negotiations, but the sudden feeling of immolation made it rather hard to joke for the next few minutes. By the time I finished blacking out, getting back up, and cleared the smoke and fumes from my lungs, the crashed remains of the bus had rolled up to a stop next to a warehouse.
Pulling myself out and throwing open the emergency door, I got to work evacuating. Figuring out the bus was, somehow, putting itself out, the obvious solution was to start pulling people out. It didn't take long, but under the soot and my puffy eyes I couldn't tell who was who.
Not that it mattered, really. I managed to get about ten people out before needing to stop and catch my breath.
"Where the fuck am I?" I heard someone say, prompting an annoyed look.
"Well, if I knew, we'd both be the wiser." I shot back. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Glitch."
"Ugh. Fair enough, I suppose. It'd be nice to not have this splitting headache, though."
"I don't know how to fix that." I replied, shrugging. "If you can get Medic or Shiro up, they'll probably have aspirin. I'm going to see where the hell we are- wish me luck."
Walking outside the building, I squinted carefully. Lots of vaguely Asiatic architecture, pagodas everywhere, fairly green surroundings, people looking at me like I stepped out of a dump… also everything looked fairly anime. Including me, unfortunately. My face had been tightened up, beard turning into lanky sideburns you couldn't see through at the drop of the hat and a stiff mustache, my hair forming a wild blonde mane. My clothes, meanwhile, had defaulted to one of my more iconic outfits, and not the one I'd been wearing when the bus crashed. I was now in my leather greatcoat, jeans, and a flannel shirt under a green vest I'd crammed full of candy and pocket tools over the years.
After identifying that we were, in fact, in an anime with a kinda janky CGI engine, I went back to the warehouse. Glitcher had managed to get most everyone up, including who was- in my totally unbiased opinion- the most important person there. My girlfriend. Running over, I ignored the too-new face and wide blinking eyes.
"Shiro?"
She grinned at me sardonically. "There you are, Tabac. I was wondering where you got off to."
"Oh, nothing serious." I replied. "Just a little walk, try to figure out where we are."
I heard a cough from next to me, which told me two things. One, Spectral was awake; and two, I'd apparently rushed straight into the girl's section of the warehouse without thinking.
"Well, I can answer that question." Spectral replied, grinning at me. "This place looks like Haven… No… wherever Haven is. Mistral? I'm about 90% sure we got Isekai'd into RWBY."
I paled. "Well, fuck."
///
It was about a half hour later that we were all seated around the center of the warehouse, all eighteen of us that had managed to wake up so far. Certainly, an auspicious start. Since this had been my rodeo pre-transfer, it was my show post-isekai event too. My palms might have been clammy, but my mind was still fairly clear. Looking across the group, I breathed in for a minute, and got down to business.
"So we've been transported to RWBY of all things." I said, trying to get a handle on things. "An unrepentant death world, trapped between an actual no-shit evil overlord and dumbass chessmaster who, according to all the available data, can't actually be killed to put him out of the picture. As a group, our employment options are slim since nobody in the area seems to speak English, and we're stuck in the seedy part of Mistral. Our odds aren't good, we don't know when in the timeline we're at, and we need a plan to get cash and make sure we're independent of the big players, since they're all fucking idiots."
Shiro held up a finger, and I nodded to her. "We could always check the Hunter Academy, and see what they're doing. If it's before Lionheart closes it down, we're below Volume Five."
"Or we could find a newspaper and see what the betting odds are." Spectral chimed in. "If Pyrrha Nikos is on there, then we're before Volume One."
"There's also Vytal Festival timing." Glitch mentioned. "We should probably have a plan for that."
"Do we even want to get involved in the canon events of RWBY?" Medic asked carefully, looking at me.
"You say that, but there's every chance that the main plot will grab us and drag us along whether we like it or not." Winged One replied laconically. "I'd at least like to build a few working railguns by that point, myself."
A round of ragged cheers went out as everyone started realizing that they'd get to create their own custom weapons, and I groaned as I realized I would have to start making crazy-ass custom weapons. Oh god. As a subdued mania started to break out, I took my head in my hands and sighed deeply. It was a while before Shiro stopped to rub my back, giving me strength to get back to the stand.
"Alright, alright, hold it everyone!" I yelled. "We'll build your crazy shit, I promise, I promise. We've got to get regular guns first, though, or we'll be screwed the first time we run into Grimm!"
Everyone quieted down for a minute. "Let's face it, none of us are soldiers-"
"Hey!"
"Okay, everyone except Strypgia over there," I said, pointing to the offending pile of camouflage and redhead, "is not a soldier. We're gonna need a plan, and a shitload of guns."
At that point, a rumble came out from the far side of the circle by Tortuga.
"And food." I added. "We're probably going to need food."
///
Almost a week later, we'd finished selling what was left of the bus via using Marcus (the only one of us who spoke broken Mandarin) and getting food. While rice and pickled cucumber salad might have gotten real damn old after a while, between Toptorp, Soverihn, and Spoder, they had found enough junk to smack together a lathe, mill, and drill press. From there, it was a matter of getting Error and Sov to steal some sheet metal out of the train yard. It was rather confusing, how nobody actually tried to guard shit, but it didn't matter as long as we could start using it to start stapling together a couple of guns. Between me and Winged, however, we remembered enough about guns to start tacking together guns. Specifically, shotguns.
I was not a clever person when it came to gun design, and more importantly we needed something simple to make. Smacking together a duplet shotgun wasn't too far beyond my abilities, and we all needed guns. Why? Because this was fucking RWBY. I wasn't sure whether it would be Grimm, terrorists with animal ears, gangsters, Huntsmen, bandits, Main Characters, or children with more ordnance than sense, but something was going to crash our party. The real problem was ammunition.
The crux of it was nobody used standardized calibers in Remnant. Dumb as fucking shit, but the there were bullet molds for ten thousand shapes, bags of shot, and hundreds of different types of brass cases when I'd had to go to the Dust store to stock up. I'd decided to standardize on 18.5mm rimmed case and full case of #3 shot, loaded with a standard war load of sixty grams of Fire dust. I'd have to do some testing, of course, but my estimation from the recoil of the gun was that things were kind of light in terms of punchiness. If at all possible, I'd like to boost it with gunpowder, but that was… a little out of our means right now. Dust was really expensive, and since "steal from a gun shop" is the sort of absolutely stupid thing I wasn't going to do, most of our limited liquid funds were tied up in this.
Practically speaking, we still needed a lot of things. Money, chemicals, people learning the local language… yeah, it was going to be a mess. On the plus side, though, I had the big list of what everyone was doing with their week! Pretty sure that wasn't something to be excited over, but it would work. Maybe now I could take a break? I hoped so. I really hoped so.
When I tried to take said break, though, work came to haunt me again. This time, it was in the form of the "administrators" coming to stare at me with the most typical stares possible. Morgue and Kyram were both looking at me with beady black eyes and clipboards at the ready, and I groaned. Paperwork, my old enemy, was here again. In defense of my friends, I'll say they chose to battle the beast themselves. That said, could they not drag it over to my bedroll?
"Hey." Morgue said frankly. "So how much stuff did you build today?"
"About the same as yesterday." I replied, grumbling. "We did three new shotguns, and I think I finished the ammo press. There's also about forty more rounds, which probably won't tear this time."
Kyram nodded, scribbling frantically. "And how many rounds are we looking at per day, if we had unlimited supplies? More importantly, are there any storage restrictions on ammunition at this time?"
"You could just ask Winged." Morgue said calmly, before shooting me a stink eye. "We can't keep making bullets if we don't know what we're making bullets for."
"I mean, I think it would be obvious." I grumbled. "We're going Grimm hunting at some point, once we actually figure out how to sign up for this and get a vehicle together. On-site procurement is going to be next to impossible unless we're looting for scrap."
"Which is going to raise a mess of ethical questions we probably shouldn't crack open on so many fronts, considering most of that 'scrap' is going to be from someone who got killed."
I sighed, leaning back on the old drum of something that I was using as a headboard to my bedroll. "I was more concerned about dealing with corpses, but yes. We're limited to what we bring in, which means we need a vehicle for logistics and ideally heavy weapons."
Morgue glared at me. "You know this will cost an arm and a leg, right? We don't have a lot of those to spare."
"We'll get a junker and spruce it up a little."
"The only people here I trust fixing a car is Winged, Drake, and Glitch."
I laughed. "That's plenty of people to work on a junker! Besides, Glitch isn't doing much right now, so we can put him on that, transfer Spoder to work with him, and that should be enough to get some old Tacoma-equivalent working again."
"YOU BETTER NOT BE SHIT-TALKING MY TRUCK AGAIN!" Shiro yelled from across the warehouse where she was working on tying together a hammock so we weren't always sleeping on the ground.
"YOUR TRUCK ISN'T EVEN A PROBLEM ANYMORE!" I yelled back. Whispering, I glared at Morgue. "Besides, I'm pretty sure we can't find a truck that shitty in all of Remnant."
Morgue just raised an eyebrow. "We barely have three thousand Lien. That's probably our price-range."
"We'll sell some shotguns, then. We only really need a half-dozen, and I can bash out some Ashots."
Kyram looked over to me, curious. "We can increase production? By what factor?"
"Unless we can teach the space cadet over there that Swartz bugged me into bringing, by a factor of none." I grumbled. "Our real limitation is building trigger groups. Besides, I don't think Ashots will sell that well- they're pretty shit guns."
"They'll be better once you figure out how to start thinning out the Dust with gunpowder or something."
"I'm not messing around with chemical science until we're reasonably settled in." I complained. "We need to buy laboratory glass and get a textbook or something, since I'm not sure if we're going to try for ammonium nitrate or guncotton, which requires finding sulphuric acid and then handling sulphuric acid, which you know poisonous fumes and shit."
"I'll have to set that up in it's own space and get some ventilation working, then." Kyram muttered. "Probably on the opposite side from the kitchen, then, with a seperate storage zone… Tabac? Would we need this to be near the workshop?"
My brain ground gears as I tried to conceptualize the layout of the workshop, before nodding. "We'll put it across the isle from the tool shop, on the front wall."
"Okay." Kyram said, smiling. "I'll get my chalk line out and start marking it out."
"Great." I muttered, closing my eyes. "Can I go to sleep now?"
"Nope." I heard a smug voice say, prompting me to sit up and throw my pillow at him. It was Strypgia, returning the thrown pillow at the speed of sound. Catching it with my face, I fell back into my bedroll.
"So what do you need?" I asked, grumbling.
"I need Winged to help me steal a truck."
"...why do you need to steal a truck?"
"I found a still, and I need a hand to get it back here."
Looking at someone in their late thirties with the intense disappointment that I normally reserved for eight year olds who'd poked carrion with a stick was a profound new experience for me. Still, I could sort of understand the logic, since we'd need industrial strength alcohol for some stuff.
Also, I would not say no to vodka right now. Vodka would really make this job so much easier.
"Right, you do that." I told Stryp, sighing. "Have fun, make sure you steal new plates for it on the way, and do you need me to get you something from the armory?"
"That would be appreciated!" he said happily, forcing me to get up and head to the little chalk-lined square that Kyram had marked off for "armory". We didn't actually have any furniture for the armory, which didn't sound like a bad thing until it became obvious that my preferred method of storing the shotguns was to break them open at the rear hinge and draped over a clothesline I'd strung up. Ammunition, meanwhile, was in cleaned-out takeout boxes stacked up six high in places. Grabbing one of the guns, I checked the breech carefully, then snapped it shut and opened it again before handing it to Strypgia. Picking up another one, I made sure it was empty and started showing off the controls.
"Say hello to the most idiotproof shotgun that we could put together." I said, sighing. "If this was any simpler, I'd have to explain this with a Russian accent."
"Hah."
"Yeah, yeah." I grumbled. "Anyway, bottom latch serves as the lock and release, and don't open it up quickly if you don't want to run the ejectors. It's got a double trigger, and the right barrel fires first. Fair warning, there's no safety except one to keep it from firing out of battery, and that's just a hammer interrupter."
"Looks like a Khyber Pass special, but it'll probably work." Strypgia muttered. "Have you done a test shot?"
"Double the standard charge on both barrels at once. No cracking or nothing." I said, grinning. "Say what you will, but these things are damn sturdy. Take a few things of ammo, and get going! We can't wait forever for that car!"
"Okay, okay!" Strype said, laughing. "I'll go already!"
Sighing, I watched him and Winged walk out, just before the back alley blasted. Running over to the door out into the narrow as all hell path behind the warehouse, I saw Error chuckling at the ruined salvage glassware we'd found.
"Good news!" he said laconically. "I figured some stuff out!"
Trying not to roll my eyes, I looked at the shards of glass that ended up everywhere.
"Fire, dust, local knockoff propellant, et cetera," Error began as I dragged him inside. "Not hugely usable as propellant, though; energetic yes, but it burns too bloody fast."
I raised an eyebrow. "So it's high explosive?"
"No, I think it's sublimating, then it's igniting, except it ignites really quickly so we get a shockwave from the ignition. That's my working theory, at least. Also the powders are horribly shock sensitive, but not at all electrosensitive. Absolutely nothing when I tried to light it with Spoder's electric lighter."
"Good to know." I grumbled, before checking my watch. "Come on in and stop blowing up the alley, if you don't mind- we're supposed to be getting the shopping team back soon, and someone who's not Kyram needs to do inventory."
"Why not Kyram?" Error asked.
"He's going to be working with Tortuga building the kitchen."
Naturally, in the spirit of jolly timeliness, it took another hour for Marcus, Glitch, and Spectral to get back from the mall. I'd decided to do the sensible thing and try to sleep, which failed miserably next to construction noises, before the rolling door in the front opened up.
"Ohhhh Laaaa-diiiies!" Marcus yelled. "I bought clooooothes!"
"And the rest of us brought useful shit." Medic called out. "Shiro, can you help me get this all sorted away?"
"Sure." my girlfriend called out, before the two of them disappeared into the general stockroom. Meanwhile, I was stuck dealing with Marcus and his six bags of almost-rags he'd gotten for cheap at the Mistrali equivalent of a Salvation Army.
"What did you do, go in the back and said you needed three unsorted bins?" I griped as I went through a shopping bag. "Some of us are more than two meters tall, half this shit won't fit!"
"Actually, I said I needed a lot of stuff for a Hunter group that needed stuff to use in camp." Marcus clarified. "After I get it sorted, I'm crashing. Brain tired, too many weird characters."
"Duly noted." I said, chuckling. "Spectral, mon ami Canadian, what's in the news?"
"First things first, I have no idea when we are." Spectral said, scratching her hair. "It's before the Vytal festival, and I couldn't really dig up anything before Marcus had us pack it in. The tournament circuit isn't running right now, either, so I can't guarantee if we're in before Season One or what."
I shrugged. "I figured it would be a long shot. If you want to keep going out with the shopping runs, though, I'd appreciate it."
Spectral shrugged. "Sure, maybe I can get some more specific news along the way."
"That's fine." I replied. "Honestly, as long as you throw your vote in the ballot box on what the plan is, I'll take whatever you want to do. Speaking of which…"
Going over to the common area that served as the dining area and lounge, I grabbed a cardboard box from the shopping spree and wrote on the top VOTES, and grabbed a marker and a ripped-up bedsheet.
THE RULES
THIS IS PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE. PLEASE WRITE YOUR VOTE AS ANSWERS TO THE POSED QUESTIONS
Below that was another box lid, with two questions on it.
///
A week later, I knew the answers to these questions- yes, and also yes. Now how the hell were we supposed to pull this off?
----------------
This Adventure Brought To You By:
@7734
@Glitchrr36
@Spectral Waltz
@FC Error
@TortugaGreen
@B-baka!
@Winged_One²
@Marcus Aurelius
@Strypgia
@Aires Drake
@Spectre
@Soverihn
@Kyr'am
@Random Guy
And some people without accounts here, one request not to be mentioned, and several advisors backstage. Here goes nothing, guys!
Naturally, things went a little south when the bus driver ran a yellow and we got T-boned by a British Petroleum tanker. I'd make a joke about explosive Brexit negotiations, but the sudden feeling of immolation made it rather hard to joke for the next few minutes. By the time I finished blacking out, getting back up, and cleared the smoke and fumes from my lungs, the crashed remains of the bus had rolled up to a stop next to a warehouse.
Pulling myself out and throwing open the emergency door, I got to work evacuating. Figuring out the bus was, somehow, putting itself out, the obvious solution was to start pulling people out. It didn't take long, but under the soot and my puffy eyes I couldn't tell who was who.
Not that it mattered, really. I managed to get about ten people out before needing to stop and catch my breath.
"Where the fuck am I?" I heard someone say, prompting an annoyed look.
"Well, if I knew, we'd both be the wiser." I shot back. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Glitch."
"Ugh. Fair enough, I suppose. It'd be nice to not have this splitting headache, though."
"I don't know how to fix that." I replied, shrugging. "If you can get Medic or Shiro up, they'll probably have aspirin. I'm going to see where the hell we are- wish me luck."
Walking outside the building, I squinted carefully. Lots of vaguely Asiatic architecture, pagodas everywhere, fairly green surroundings, people looking at me like I stepped out of a dump… also everything looked fairly anime. Including me, unfortunately. My face had been tightened up, beard turning into lanky sideburns you couldn't see through at the drop of the hat and a stiff mustache, my hair forming a wild blonde mane. My clothes, meanwhile, had defaulted to one of my more iconic outfits, and not the one I'd been wearing when the bus crashed. I was now in my leather greatcoat, jeans, and a flannel shirt under a green vest I'd crammed full of candy and pocket tools over the years.
After identifying that we were, in fact, in an anime with a kinda janky CGI engine, I went back to the warehouse. Glitcher had managed to get most everyone up, including who was- in my totally unbiased opinion- the most important person there. My girlfriend. Running over, I ignored the too-new face and wide blinking eyes.
"Shiro?"
She grinned at me sardonically. "There you are, Tabac. I was wondering where you got off to."
"Oh, nothing serious." I replied. "Just a little walk, try to figure out where we are."
I heard a cough from next to me, which told me two things. One, Spectral was awake; and two, I'd apparently rushed straight into the girl's section of the warehouse without thinking.
"Well, I can answer that question." Spectral replied, grinning at me. "This place looks like Haven… No… wherever Haven is. Mistral? I'm about 90% sure we got Isekai'd into RWBY."
I paled. "Well, fuck."
///
It was about a half hour later that we were all seated around the center of the warehouse, all eighteen of us that had managed to wake up so far. Certainly, an auspicious start. Since this had been my rodeo pre-transfer, it was my show post-isekai event too. My palms might have been clammy, but my mind was still fairly clear. Looking across the group, I breathed in for a minute, and got down to business.
"So we've been transported to RWBY of all things." I said, trying to get a handle on things. "An unrepentant death world, trapped between an actual no-shit evil overlord and dumbass chessmaster who, according to all the available data, can't actually be killed to put him out of the picture. As a group, our employment options are slim since nobody in the area seems to speak English, and we're stuck in the seedy part of Mistral. Our odds aren't good, we don't know when in the timeline we're at, and we need a plan to get cash and make sure we're independent of the big players, since they're all fucking idiots."
Shiro held up a finger, and I nodded to her. "We could always check the Hunter Academy, and see what they're doing. If it's before Lionheart closes it down, we're below Volume Five."
"Or we could find a newspaper and see what the betting odds are." Spectral chimed in. "If Pyrrha Nikos is on there, then we're before Volume One."
"There's also Vytal Festival timing." Glitch mentioned. "We should probably have a plan for that."
"Do we even want to get involved in the canon events of RWBY?" Medic asked carefully, looking at me.
"You say that, but there's every chance that the main plot will grab us and drag us along whether we like it or not." Winged One replied laconically. "I'd at least like to build a few working railguns by that point, myself."
A round of ragged cheers went out as everyone started realizing that they'd get to create their own custom weapons, and I groaned as I realized I would have to start making crazy-ass custom weapons. Oh god. As a subdued mania started to break out, I took my head in my hands and sighed deeply. It was a while before Shiro stopped to rub my back, giving me strength to get back to the stand.
"Alright, alright, hold it everyone!" I yelled. "We'll build your crazy shit, I promise, I promise. We've got to get regular guns first, though, or we'll be screwed the first time we run into Grimm!"
Everyone quieted down for a minute. "Let's face it, none of us are soldiers-"
"Hey!"
"Okay, everyone except Strypgia over there," I said, pointing to the offending pile of camouflage and redhead, "is not a soldier. We're gonna need a plan, and a shitload of guns."
At that point, a rumble came out from the far side of the circle by Tortuga.
"And food." I added. "We're probably going to need food."
///
Almost a week later, we'd finished selling what was left of the bus via using Marcus (the only one of us who spoke broken Mandarin) and getting food. While rice and pickled cucumber salad might have gotten real damn old after a while, between Toptorp, Soverihn, and Spoder, they had found enough junk to smack together a lathe, mill, and drill press. From there, it was a matter of getting Error and Sov to steal some sheet metal out of the train yard. It was rather confusing, how nobody actually tried to guard shit, but it didn't matter as long as we could start using it to start stapling together a couple of guns. Between me and Winged, however, we remembered enough about guns to start tacking together guns. Specifically, shotguns.
I was not a clever person when it came to gun design, and more importantly we needed something simple to make. Smacking together a duplet shotgun wasn't too far beyond my abilities, and we all needed guns. Why? Because this was fucking RWBY. I wasn't sure whether it would be Grimm, terrorists with animal ears, gangsters, Huntsmen, bandits, Main Characters, or children with more ordnance than sense, but something was going to crash our party. The real problem was ammunition.
The crux of it was nobody used standardized calibers in Remnant. Dumb as fucking shit, but the there were bullet molds for ten thousand shapes, bags of shot, and hundreds of different types of brass cases when I'd had to go to the Dust store to stock up. I'd decided to standardize on 18.5mm rimmed case and full case of #3 shot, loaded with a standard war load of sixty grams of Fire dust. I'd have to do some testing, of course, but my estimation from the recoil of the gun was that things were kind of light in terms of punchiness. If at all possible, I'd like to boost it with gunpowder, but that was… a little out of our means right now. Dust was really expensive, and since "steal from a gun shop" is the sort of absolutely stupid thing I wasn't going to do, most of our limited liquid funds were tied up in this.
Practically speaking, we still needed a lot of things. Money, chemicals, people learning the local language… yeah, it was going to be a mess. On the plus side, though, I had the big list of what everyone was doing with their week! Pretty sure that wasn't something to be excited over, but it would work. Maybe now I could take a break? I hoped so. I really hoped so.
When I tried to take said break, though, work came to haunt me again. This time, it was in the form of the "administrators" coming to stare at me with the most typical stares possible. Morgue and Kyram were both looking at me with beady black eyes and clipboards at the ready, and I groaned. Paperwork, my old enemy, was here again. In defense of my friends, I'll say they chose to battle the beast themselves. That said, could they not drag it over to my bedroll?
"Hey." Morgue said frankly. "So how much stuff did you build today?"
"About the same as yesterday." I replied, grumbling. "We did three new shotguns, and I think I finished the ammo press. There's also about forty more rounds, which probably won't tear this time."
Kyram nodded, scribbling frantically. "And how many rounds are we looking at per day, if we had unlimited supplies? More importantly, are there any storage restrictions on ammunition at this time?"
"You could just ask Winged." Morgue said calmly, before shooting me a stink eye. "We can't keep making bullets if we don't know what we're making bullets for."
"I mean, I think it would be obvious." I grumbled. "We're going Grimm hunting at some point, once we actually figure out how to sign up for this and get a vehicle together. On-site procurement is going to be next to impossible unless we're looting for scrap."
"Which is going to raise a mess of ethical questions we probably shouldn't crack open on so many fronts, considering most of that 'scrap' is going to be from someone who got killed."
I sighed, leaning back on the old drum of something that I was using as a headboard to my bedroll. "I was more concerned about dealing with corpses, but yes. We're limited to what we bring in, which means we need a vehicle for logistics and ideally heavy weapons."
Morgue glared at me. "You know this will cost an arm and a leg, right? We don't have a lot of those to spare."
"We'll get a junker and spruce it up a little."
"The only people here I trust fixing a car is Winged, Drake, and Glitch."
I laughed. "That's plenty of people to work on a junker! Besides, Glitch isn't doing much right now, so we can put him on that, transfer Spoder to work with him, and that should be enough to get some old Tacoma-equivalent working again."
"YOU BETTER NOT BE SHIT-TALKING MY TRUCK AGAIN!" Shiro yelled from across the warehouse where she was working on tying together a hammock so we weren't always sleeping on the ground.
"YOUR TRUCK ISN'T EVEN A PROBLEM ANYMORE!" I yelled back. Whispering, I glared at Morgue. "Besides, I'm pretty sure we can't find a truck that shitty in all of Remnant."
Morgue just raised an eyebrow. "We barely have three thousand Lien. That's probably our price-range."
"We'll sell some shotguns, then. We only really need a half-dozen, and I can bash out some Ashots."
Kyram looked over to me, curious. "We can increase production? By what factor?"
"Unless we can teach the space cadet over there that Swartz bugged me into bringing, by a factor of none." I grumbled. "Our real limitation is building trigger groups. Besides, I don't think Ashots will sell that well- they're pretty shit guns."
"They'll be better once you figure out how to start thinning out the Dust with gunpowder or something."
"I'm not messing around with chemical science until we're reasonably settled in." I complained. "We need to buy laboratory glass and get a textbook or something, since I'm not sure if we're going to try for ammonium nitrate or guncotton, which requires finding sulphuric acid and then handling sulphuric acid, which you know poisonous fumes and shit."
"I'll have to set that up in it's own space and get some ventilation working, then." Kyram muttered. "Probably on the opposite side from the kitchen, then, with a seperate storage zone… Tabac? Would we need this to be near the workshop?"
My brain ground gears as I tried to conceptualize the layout of the workshop, before nodding. "We'll put it across the isle from the tool shop, on the front wall."
"Okay." Kyram said, smiling. "I'll get my chalk line out and start marking it out."
"Great." I muttered, closing my eyes. "Can I go to sleep now?"
"Nope." I heard a smug voice say, prompting me to sit up and throw my pillow at him. It was Strypgia, returning the thrown pillow at the speed of sound. Catching it with my face, I fell back into my bedroll.
"So what do you need?" I asked, grumbling.
"I need Winged to help me steal a truck."
"...why do you need to steal a truck?"
"I found a still, and I need a hand to get it back here."
Looking at someone in their late thirties with the intense disappointment that I normally reserved for eight year olds who'd poked carrion with a stick was a profound new experience for me. Still, I could sort of understand the logic, since we'd need industrial strength alcohol for some stuff.
Also, I would not say no to vodka right now. Vodka would really make this job so much easier.
"Right, you do that." I told Stryp, sighing. "Have fun, make sure you steal new plates for it on the way, and do you need me to get you something from the armory?"
"That would be appreciated!" he said happily, forcing me to get up and head to the little chalk-lined square that Kyram had marked off for "armory". We didn't actually have any furniture for the armory, which didn't sound like a bad thing until it became obvious that my preferred method of storing the shotguns was to break them open at the rear hinge and draped over a clothesline I'd strung up. Ammunition, meanwhile, was in cleaned-out takeout boxes stacked up six high in places. Grabbing one of the guns, I checked the breech carefully, then snapped it shut and opened it again before handing it to Strypgia. Picking up another one, I made sure it was empty and started showing off the controls.
"Say hello to the most idiotproof shotgun that we could put together." I said, sighing. "If this was any simpler, I'd have to explain this with a Russian accent."
"Hah."
"Yeah, yeah." I grumbled. "Anyway, bottom latch serves as the lock and release, and don't open it up quickly if you don't want to run the ejectors. It's got a double trigger, and the right barrel fires first. Fair warning, there's no safety except one to keep it from firing out of battery, and that's just a hammer interrupter."
"Looks like a Khyber Pass special, but it'll probably work." Strypgia muttered. "Have you done a test shot?"
"Double the standard charge on both barrels at once. No cracking or nothing." I said, grinning. "Say what you will, but these things are damn sturdy. Take a few things of ammo, and get going! We can't wait forever for that car!"
"Okay, okay!" Strype said, laughing. "I'll go already!"
Sighing, I watched him and Winged walk out, just before the back alley blasted. Running over to the door out into the narrow as all hell path behind the warehouse, I saw Error chuckling at the ruined salvage glassware we'd found.
"Good news!" he said laconically. "I figured some stuff out!"
Trying not to roll my eyes, I looked at the shards of glass that ended up everywhere.
"Fire, dust, local knockoff propellant, et cetera," Error began as I dragged him inside. "Not hugely usable as propellant, though; energetic yes, but it burns too bloody fast."
I raised an eyebrow. "So it's high explosive?"
"No, I think it's sublimating, then it's igniting, except it ignites really quickly so we get a shockwave from the ignition. That's my working theory, at least. Also the powders are horribly shock sensitive, but not at all electrosensitive. Absolutely nothing when I tried to light it with Spoder's electric lighter."
"Good to know." I grumbled, before checking my watch. "Come on in and stop blowing up the alley, if you don't mind- we're supposed to be getting the shopping team back soon, and someone who's not Kyram needs to do inventory."
"Why not Kyram?" Error asked.
"He's going to be working with Tortuga building the kitchen."
Naturally, in the spirit of jolly timeliness, it took another hour for Marcus, Glitch, and Spectral to get back from the mall. I'd decided to do the sensible thing and try to sleep, which failed miserably next to construction noises, before the rolling door in the front opened up.
"Ohhhh Laaaa-diiiies!" Marcus yelled. "I bought clooooothes!"
"And the rest of us brought useful shit." Medic called out. "Shiro, can you help me get this all sorted away?"
"Sure." my girlfriend called out, before the two of them disappeared into the general stockroom. Meanwhile, I was stuck dealing with Marcus and his six bags of almost-rags he'd gotten for cheap at the Mistrali equivalent of a Salvation Army.
"What did you do, go in the back and said you needed three unsorted bins?" I griped as I went through a shopping bag. "Some of us are more than two meters tall, half this shit won't fit!"
"Actually, I said I needed a lot of stuff for a Hunter group that needed stuff to use in camp." Marcus clarified. "After I get it sorted, I'm crashing. Brain tired, too many weird characters."
"Duly noted." I said, chuckling. "Spectral, mon ami Canadian, what's in the news?"
"First things first, I have no idea when we are." Spectral said, scratching her hair. "It's before the Vytal festival, and I couldn't really dig up anything before Marcus had us pack it in. The tournament circuit isn't running right now, either, so I can't guarantee if we're in before Season One or what."
I shrugged. "I figured it would be a long shot. If you want to keep going out with the shopping runs, though, I'd appreciate it."
Spectral shrugged. "Sure, maybe I can get some more specific news along the way."
"That's fine." I replied. "Honestly, as long as you throw your vote in the ballot box on what the plan is, I'll take whatever you want to do. Speaking of which…"
Going over to the common area that served as the dining area and lounge, I grabbed a cardboard box from the shopping spree and wrote on the top VOTES, and grabbed a marker and a ripped-up bedsheet.
THE RULES
THIS IS PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE. PLEASE WRITE YOUR VOTE AS ANSWERS TO THE POSED QUESTIONS
Below that was another box lid, with two questions on it.
- SHOULD WE INTERFERE WITH VYTAL FESTIVAL?
- SHOULD WE PLAN TO LEAVE THIS AREA?
///
A week later, I knew the answers to these questions- yes, and also yes. Now how the hell were we supposed to pull this off?
----------------
This Adventure Brought To You By:
@7734
@Glitchrr36
@Spectral Waltz
@FC Error
@TortugaGreen
@B-baka!
@Winged_One²
@Marcus Aurelius
@Strypgia
@Aires Drake
@Spectre
@Soverihn
@Kyr'am
@Random Guy
And some people without accounts here, one request not to be mentioned, and several advisors backstage. Here goes nothing, guys!
Week 1: The Scrap Run
FC Error
Missileer
- Location
- Aware of where I am not
Some sidestory for you all;
Mistral
To call this part of the city 'gloomy' would be to undersell the word greatly. "Depressing" or "oppressive" were somewhat more evocative, though "slum" was a decent summary. If anything, the current darkness helped hide some of the mess.
I side-eyed one of the locals, slumped on the front steps of a run-down house - well, one of the many run-down houses - as we passed.
"Cheerful bunch." I muttered, glancing around. The atmosphere of general unpleasantry had a way of inspiring paranoia. Our target, however, wasn't far - the railyard came into view, surrounded by crumbling warehouses and factory buildings.
"Sheet metal, right?" I queried, glancing over at Soverihn.
"Yeah." he returned absently, looking contemplative. "Check the factory buildings first?"
"Mmmm." I agree, tossing one last glance over my shoulder as we strolled up to the nearest building, staring up at the faded logo on the wall. Eyeing the rusted door, I sighed. "Chained shut. Happy fun."
Winding up, I planted a kick into the door, jarring it open; only to be caught by the chain - barely a few centimeters of a gap taunting me.
Sov, for his part, chuckled, planting a kick of his own into the lock. The chain snapped, door slamming open.
I directed a flat stare at him. "Well, if you want to be like that." Clicking on my flashlight, I wandered inside - machinery of arcane and uncertain purpose (well, not really, it looked like an automotive plant) filling the damp space.
Picking my way over to a large press, I tugged a deformed lump of sheet metal free of a feed bin. "So how much do we want by way of sheet metal versus other bits and such?"
My partner in crime contemplated a moment. "Mostly sheet metal from here, I think. Most of the stuff in the yard would be for bulk shipping, and probably in sheets or rolls a bit large to carry."
"Unless we want to dragoon the others in or find a truck." I concurred, scanning the nearby machinery.
"Probably should find some pipe, too," Sov noted, "Tabac was talking about shotguns when we left."
"Those are going to be the most ghetto shotguns ever." I groused, casting around for a pallet truck or wheely bin to move some of the stack.
"Better than no shotguns." he countered, dragging a rather knackered cart over. After several minutes spent wrestling sheet steel - and after a brief search, some assorted lengths of pipe - we stood back, staring around for anything else relevant.
"Maybe these?" Sov inquired, holding up a box of small springs. Eyeing them, I shrugged.
"May as well - we'll probably find a use for most of the bits and pieces we might find in here."
An hour or so later saw us effectively loading up several of the castor carts with assorted materials. "The question now is how do we drag all this back to the rest." I mused, eyeing the four carts full of material.
"Push them, maybe?" Sov returned sardonically.
"Just cruise down the street at, what, not even seven in the evening, with loaded carts of scrap metal?" I countered, raising a brow. "Shady part of town maybe, but that gets noticed."
"Is there an alley or something we can use?"
"Excellent question. Let's have a look-see." Suiting actions to words, I strolled out the lightly abused door, scanning the street.
"There." Sov said, pointing. "Looks like it leads to the next street across, and from there we're a couple of blocks from any houses, so we shouldn't be easily visible."
"To the casual observer, at least. Worth a try."
Walking back over to the carts, I gave one a shove, getting it rolling, and followed, dragging a second behind it. The carts began rattling - loudly- as soon as they hit the pavement.
I sighed.
"Question."
"Answer." I answered.
Sov shot me a Look. "Who in their right mind mixes industrial and residential sectors? Look at the place. Block of factories, couple blocks of houses, block of factories… sure it'll be a short walk to work, but has nobody heard of an industrial park?"
"You ask for sanity in the world of Remnant." I returned sardonically. "Acknowledged, it seems like a common-sense thing, but this is a civilization who almost exclusively invests in a bunch of people who would genuinely find the concept of standardization insulting and who are as much fashion designers as combatants."
"Tell us how you really feel, why don't you."
"I could rant for hours about this dumbassery." I groused. "Somehow they make it work, granted, but 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' has its limits, alright."
That earned me an exasperated look. "Counterpoint, would you want to try out new, untested, and possibly ineffective methods of fighting off Grimm when the current setup works?"
"Actually yes." I grumbled, ignoring the resigned sigh from behind me. I paused, listening - something about that had sounded off.
A tap on my shoulder caught my attention - Sov pointed at something in the distance, floating over the city. "Airship. Moving this way." he muttered, dragging his carts towards a nearby building.
"Cops?" I queried, following. The door put up no noticeable resistance to Sov's boot, letting us haul our bounty inside and resume our observation of the aircraft.
"Maybe? Doesn't look big enough to be a transport."
"What I wouldn't give for a pair of binos." I note, watching. "Doesn't look like he's moving much, either, just boating around - patrol pattern?"
"Mmm." Sov hummed, apparently lost in thought. Patting my pockets, I located my notebook; pulling it and accompanying pen out, I sketched out a rough image of the ship - jotting down 'police?' underneath.
"Moving off." my counterpart pointed out; a glance up indicated it was indeed moving away, climbing.
"Damn near silent." I noted, adding that tidbit under the drawing. "That could prove an issue."
"We'll see, I guess." Soverihn half-agreed, moving to grab the carts.
"Huh." I commented, holding a vial of red crystalline dust (or, well, Dust) up to the light. "Do I want to know how much these cost?"
"No." Tabac groused, side-eyeing Marcus. "But because our actual chemists are busy, what do you know about gunpowder?"
"...enough to half-ass it, I guess. Why?" I queried, setting the vial in the box with its fellows.
"You get to take one of these," he gestured at the Fire Dust vials, "And try to figure out how much bang they give us per gram or whatever."
"Given that the locals use it as a propellant, presumably 'enough', but fair enough." I frowned. "This is going to be low-budget as all hell, you do know - literally eyeballing things."
He shrugged. "Pretty much, but until we have glassware and chem equipment and such that's about all we can do."
Dropping my gaze to the box of flammable stuff, I sighed. "Sure, what the hell. Could be fun."
<><><>
Mistral
To call this part of the city 'gloomy' would be to undersell the word greatly. "Depressing" or "oppressive" were somewhat more evocative, though "slum" was a decent summary. If anything, the current darkness helped hide some of the mess.
I side-eyed one of the locals, slumped on the front steps of a run-down house - well, one of the many run-down houses - as we passed.
"Cheerful bunch." I muttered, glancing around. The atmosphere of general unpleasantry had a way of inspiring paranoia. Our target, however, wasn't far - the railyard came into view, surrounded by crumbling warehouses and factory buildings.
"Sheet metal, right?" I queried, glancing over at Soverihn.
"Yeah." he returned absently, looking contemplative. "Check the factory buildings first?"
"Mmmm." I agree, tossing one last glance over my shoulder as we strolled up to the nearest building, staring up at the faded logo on the wall. Eyeing the rusted door, I sighed. "Chained shut. Happy fun."
Winding up, I planted a kick into the door, jarring it open; only to be caught by the chain - barely a few centimeters of a gap taunting me.
Sov, for his part, chuckled, planting a kick of his own into the lock. The chain snapped, door slamming open.
I directed a flat stare at him. "Well, if you want to be like that." Clicking on my flashlight, I wandered inside - machinery of arcane and uncertain purpose (well, not really, it looked like an automotive plant) filling the damp space.
Picking my way over to a large press, I tugged a deformed lump of sheet metal free of a feed bin. "So how much do we want by way of sheet metal versus other bits and such?"
My partner in crime contemplated a moment. "Mostly sheet metal from here, I think. Most of the stuff in the yard would be for bulk shipping, and probably in sheets or rolls a bit large to carry."
"Unless we want to dragoon the others in or find a truck." I concurred, scanning the nearby machinery.
"Probably should find some pipe, too," Sov noted, "Tabac was talking about shotguns when we left."
"Those are going to be the most ghetto shotguns ever." I groused, casting around for a pallet truck or wheely bin to move some of the stack.
"Better than no shotguns." he countered, dragging a rather knackered cart over. After several minutes spent wrestling sheet steel - and after a brief search, some assorted lengths of pipe - we stood back, staring around for anything else relevant.
"Maybe these?" Sov inquired, holding up a box of small springs. Eyeing them, I shrugged.
"May as well - we'll probably find a use for most of the bits and pieces we might find in here."
An hour or so later saw us effectively loading up several of the castor carts with assorted materials. "The question now is how do we drag all this back to the rest." I mused, eyeing the four carts full of material.
"Push them, maybe?" Sov returned sardonically.
"Just cruise down the street at, what, not even seven in the evening, with loaded carts of scrap metal?" I countered, raising a brow. "Shady part of town maybe, but that gets noticed."
"Is there an alley or something we can use?"
"Excellent question. Let's have a look-see." Suiting actions to words, I strolled out the lightly abused door, scanning the street.
"There." Sov said, pointing. "Looks like it leads to the next street across, and from there we're a couple of blocks from any houses, so we shouldn't be easily visible."
"To the casual observer, at least. Worth a try."
Walking back over to the carts, I gave one a shove, getting it rolling, and followed, dragging a second behind it. The carts began rattling - loudly- as soon as they hit the pavement.
I sighed.
<><><>
"Question."
"Answer." I answered.
Sov shot me a Look. "Who in their right mind mixes industrial and residential sectors? Look at the place. Block of factories, couple blocks of houses, block of factories… sure it'll be a short walk to work, but has nobody heard of an industrial park?"
"You ask for sanity in the world of Remnant." I returned sardonically. "Acknowledged, it seems like a common-sense thing, but this is a civilization who almost exclusively invests in a bunch of people who would genuinely find the concept of standardization insulting and who are as much fashion designers as combatants."
"Tell us how you really feel, why don't you."
"I could rant for hours about this dumbassery." I groused. "Somehow they make it work, granted, but 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' has its limits, alright."
That earned me an exasperated look. "Counterpoint, would you want to try out new, untested, and possibly ineffective methods of fighting off Grimm when the current setup works?"
"Actually yes." I grumbled, ignoring the resigned sigh from behind me. I paused, listening - something about that had sounded off.
A tap on my shoulder caught my attention - Sov pointed at something in the distance, floating over the city. "Airship. Moving this way." he muttered, dragging his carts towards a nearby building.
"Cops?" I queried, following. The door put up no noticeable resistance to Sov's boot, letting us haul our bounty inside and resume our observation of the aircraft.
"Maybe? Doesn't look big enough to be a transport."
"What I wouldn't give for a pair of binos." I note, watching. "Doesn't look like he's moving much, either, just boating around - patrol pattern?"
"Mmm." Sov hummed, apparently lost in thought. Patting my pockets, I located my notebook; pulling it and accompanying pen out, I sketched out a rough image of the ship - jotting down 'police?' underneath.
"Moving off." my counterpart pointed out; a glance up indicated it was indeed moving away, climbing.
"Damn near silent." I noted, adding that tidbit under the drawing. "That could prove an issue."
"We'll see, I guess." Soverihn half-agreed, moving to grab the carts.
<><><>
"Huh." I commented, holding a vial of red crystalline dust (or, well, Dust) up to the light. "Do I want to know how much these cost?"
"No." Tabac groused, side-eyeing Marcus. "But because our actual chemists are busy, what do you know about gunpowder?"
"...enough to half-ass it, I guess. Why?" I queried, setting the vial in the box with its fellows.
"You get to take one of these," he gestured at the Fire Dust vials, "And try to figure out how much bang they give us per gram or whatever."
"Given that the locals use it as a propellant, presumably 'enough', but fair enough." I frowned. "This is going to be low-budget as all hell, you do know - literally eyeballing things."
He shrugged. "Pretty much, but until we have glassware and chem equipment and such that's about all we can do."
Dropping my gaze to the box of flammable stuff, I sighed. "Sure, what the hell. Could be fun."
Last edited:
On Non-OP Posts
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Since I'm not going to be reposting everything that everyone here does (I'm more GM/catalog guy) everyone who does their own stuff will post it while I come in after and do threadmarks. I'll try and do weekly posts to my own storyline, though, and the threadmarks index will be kept up to date.
Spectral Waltz
Scatterbrained Writer
- Location
- Walking the Endless Corridors
Should we tag you for ease of finding when we post?
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Odds are you put it on the server to pass around for checks first, but I don't mind getting tagged to help find the post if SB's moving fast.
Week 1: Trucks and Guns
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Sitting at the low table that had been knocked together, I pulled out a sketchbook from Kyram's stash and started sketching. So far, the talk was that we'd need to get air support, ground vehicles, and heavy weapons. Looking over into the truck bay in the dead center of the warehouse, I couldn't say I disagreed with that assessment. We needed to have mobility if we were going to work in an anti-Grimm capability on a tactical and strategic level, which necessitated our own vehicle park.
"Verdammt, was zur holle ist mit dem Bolzen los?" I heard from the direction of the truck bay. Yeah… vehicles. We were working on that. Having weapons independent of the vehicles was theoretically possible, until I looked at the fact that everything was looking like a case of mobile warfare. As nice as dropping an artillery park down somewhere was, we couldn't effectively perform a mobile mission and protect vulnerable artillery units. As such, this meant that our heavy weapons would need to be mobile, effective at close and medium ranges, and be mounted to the back of trucks.
Our heavy weapons, again presuming we were going to become a company of Hunters, was going to need to include something to handle big threats like the gorilla-thing that Spectral was worried about, or the elephant grimm which I wanted to handle at some point since they were a Natural Barrier to expansion and more importantly probably were hiding a ton of Dust deposits. My memory of RWBY was foggy as hell, but the Schnee monopoly was pretty strong, which meant we'd probably want to break it up without killing anyone.
Well, probably without killing anyone. Murderous intent from some of us aside, the money we needed was probably best found by taking on Grimm. Hunting wasn't particularly lucrative due to the low safety margins and high risk of death, but considering the fact we're working together then the risks should be much lower.
Speaking of risk, we also had to deal with fucking fliers. I hated fliers. They were hard to hit, and got everywhere. More importantly, they had a tendency to be in exactly the wrong place to hit a damaged unit who needed to retreat back to the dust-off zone for medevac and re-arm. That meant we needed an anti-air vehicle. A rocket-armed system wouldn't be very good, since presuming we could build rockets that had the acceleration necessary to actually hit an airborne target, they wouldn't have the fuzing to actually detonate a warhead close enough to have a good percent of kill. This in turn meant guns.
Guns had a lot of options, which was hard. Shell-firing or straight kinetic was one major question, as well as caliber and action. Hitting my head against the table, I took my pencil and paper over to the shop where Winged was working, and squatted down on a tire.
"So, question about the anti-air piece." I said casually. "Any thoughts on what sort of gun do you want to look at?"
"Take a bunch of machine guns, staple them to a frame, add sights." Winged grunted. "We're building a ton of 'em anyway."
"We still need to design said machine-guns, and start building jigs." I countered. "It also depends on if you're building them or me, since I know how to build toggle-locks and you know theory behind roller delay."
"Except neither of us have built machine guns before." Winged replied, grumbling. "Pass me the angle grinder and a cut-off disk, will you? I'm not going to argue with a twelve millimeter bolt any longer than I have to."
Getting the tools, I passed them down while putting in my extra-cheap ear protection. Moments later, a whirring hiss started, sparks flying. Once the cut was done, Winged kept going.
"We need machine guns anyway, and the only other people who would make a standardized one would be Atlas. Incidentally, do you know what caliber those are in?"
"No, but I can ask next time I go to buy Dust." I replied. "Which will be tomorrow, since Error's doing a pretty good job figuring out Dust expansion rates."
"How's that coming, anyway?"
"I'm starting to think we could use freaking sawdust to serve as a fuel; this stuff just does not generate enough pressure!" I complained loudly. "Back home, nine mil would make about two and a half thousand bar pressure; or about four hundred and eighty joules of force on a thirteen caliber barrel. Drake hasn't pulled a pressure scale out of his ass and I'm still trying to figure out how to accurately measure quality of dust, but we're pulling anywhere from one to three hundred joules of energy off a shotgun load of Dust."
I heard a tool clunk to the ground. "What."
"Yeah, it's absurdly low-"
"No, I mean how the hell are you getting a two hundred joule difference in energy per shell? Unless you're guessing your loadings, which I know you're not-"
"-because when I do the packing, if it's overfilled it'll fucking explode-"
"-then there's a massive quality differential of Dust that we're using."
I shrugged, and moved into the workshop where my ammo press was. To make shotgun ammo, all I needed to do was get my raw shotgun shells, set primers in them, and then go over to my measuring set and load the powder and wad. On top of the wad went the shot, a little melted paraffin wax to help hold everything together and watertight the shell, and the thin wax paper cover over top. In Remnant, shotgun shells and other cheap ammo wasn't a plastic case like it was at home: instead, there was a brass cup with the primer, with four prongs sticking up and out, which then had a heavyweight, almost cardboard-like paper over them that was heavily doped with something to make it stiff and water-resistant.
Sighing, I just went to work, Winged coming over to watch as I set a primer and dolloped the resin over it to hold it still.
"The problem, I think." I said as I reached over for the comically large glass phial full of Fire Dust. "Is that we don't have any consistent quality of Dust."
"Are you just buying whatever's on sale?" Winged asked, glaring at the dozens of differently-marked canisters on my shelf.
My silence spoke volumes as I measured out sixty grams of Fire Dust into the little reloading spoon I'd gotten with the "Gun Loading for Dummies" kit, before dumping it into the shell. Carefully grabbing a wooden pin, I pushed it down to seat the powder, and pulled it out before putting in the wad.
"Oh my god you literally bought out the bottom sale shelf didn't you."
"In my defense, I can't read this language for one, and for two I'm being very careful not to mix Dusts together so all my batches remain consistent internally." I griped, filling it with shot and getting ready to heat up the wax. "I don't want to accidentally make an Iowa happen again, where something burns funny or some bullshit interaction happens, and kerblewy."
"And you wrote this all down, right?"
"Of course I wrote all that down!" I complained. "And then, because everyone complains about my handwriting, I got Kyram to copy it down."
Moments later, I heard a rustle. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Kyram there with a clipboard and a look at me like I was going to tell him something important. Instead, I asked a question.
"Did someone pull a shotgun from inventory again or something?"
"Actually, yes." Kyram replied. "Drake grabbed one and ammunition lot 26 while he went out looking for a new warehouse to do his explosive chemistry in."
I creased my brow. "Lot 26… that one got made with powder six… he'll be fine. That one falls pretty average."
"And the below-average lots?" Winged grumbled.
"Test ammo!" I replied, going over to the gunsmithing bench. "I've been working on a Shambler in my free time, and it's only exploded twice so far!"
I could feel a set of eye twitches behind me. Chuckling, I just racked open the action and smiled. "Believe it or not, I do in fact have a method to my madness. The toggle lock breaks low enough for shit ammo, but once the extraction cycle finishes the gun eats spare energy via a second mainspring."
"You are an absolute madman and that will kill you." Winged said, incredibly deadpan.
"If I have to use this, there's probably something already trying to kill me." I replied, racking the action again hard enough to hit the massively stiff buffer spring. "I know how to build toggle-lock madness, I don't have to like it. A saner system would let me go with a box mag instead of this rotary rack, and my barrel length is terrible."
"Just for that, you have to figure out how to get the bed off that damn truck." Winged grumbled. "I'm going back to sorting springs and seeing if someone accidentally grabbed a gun drill. We're not going to be able to use pipe forever."
I shrugged. I could automotive well enough to get the truck bed off, right?
//
In retrospect, getting the truck bed off was mostly done, and only needed a little quality time with the angle grinder to finish off. Once it was free, I conscripted Medic and Morgue to help me heave it off the actual vehicle while we decided what to do next. We knew this thing was getting technical-ized, but the problem was the bed seemed to be nothing but a rusted-out fashion statement, without any structural members in it at all or real load-bearing capability. Underneath was the chassis, though, and it didn't take long to start trying to figure out how we were going to rig this all up.
"I'm thinking we just put a pair of beams on the back, and just mount something firing over the cab." Medic offered, waving his hand at the back. "After that, we weld up a dump bed for us, and we're good."
"That's a good general purpose mount, but it limits traverse." I replied. "Hey, Spectral!"
"Yeah? What is it?"
"How much do you remember about Bullheads?"
"A decent amount. Do you need something on them?"
I shrugged, waving my hand. "Think we can do sling-loading?"
"Yeah, they did it in volume one with shipping containers of dust.."
Grinning, I cracked my neck. "Good to know. That means we can make this thing airmobile."
Medic side-eyed me. "That doesn't answer literally anything." he said carefully. "Much less propose a counter-plan."
"Bear with me a minute." I replied, going over to my notebook.
"You're going to pull out some galaxy brain bullshit on me, aren't you." Medic said, sighing.
"Well yes, but no, but mostly yes." I said, gesturing towards the workshop. "Walk with me?"
"Why not…" Medic muttered. "What's the worst that could go wrong?"
"Anyway, the problem is entirely one of caliber." I explained. "I've been going back and forth with Winged on this, and we're trying to decide how we're doing calibers. I want to do a rifle caliber, and then have a heavy machine gun caliber, and phase out the shotguns as fast as we can."
"Okay…"
"The problem with this, though, is that once we all have our Aura unlocked-"
"-is that we'll want to re-tool for when we actually do have Aura, and want a bigger rifle cartridge." Winged explained from where he was diving through the shoebox marked "springs". "So my idea is just to do everything in rifle caliber, then we totally shut down and re-tool, and then spin up into a bigger cartridge. Also get rid of the shotguns because they're terrible."
"Winged has more logistic simplicity, I have more battlefield utility." I explained, cracking my knuckles and sweeping some crap to the corner of my workbench. "If we do it his way, I only need to build one ammunition production line, and then a little stamp so we can make disintegrating link ammo for the machine guns. If we do it my way, we need two production lines and I need to make fixed link ammunition belts, but we can keep one line running at all times and we won't really ever need to shut down."
Medic looked at me like I was drunk. "Tabac, you do realize you're the only one crazy enough to make ammo, right?"
"Not anymore!" I replied, grinning. "Say hello to our new ammunition loader, Space!"
Space looked up from his Mistrali comic book he'd gotten from somewhere and waved. Pulling him over, I smiled as non-threateningly as possible and grinned.
"From today out, Space is going to be taking over from me in loading shotgun shells! This means I've got time to actually build some mass production tools, I can work with Markus to actually figure out what the fuck this dust is and fix the combustion issues, hell, I can actually get to work with building a pistol line!"
Space blinked as I planted him down in front of the reloading bench next to my workbench. "By the way, we're still at critical ammo levels, and you can help build the forge if you can use up the rest of our Fire Dust by, say, Thursday."
Medic just groaned. "He's a kid, Tab."
I rolled my eyes. "He's also, rather unfortunately, in the habit of eating food and working on stuff."
"I can speak for myself, you know." Space grumbled.
"Then please, do so." I replied. "Otherwise, you're going to end up on the odd jobs patrol or something."
Turning back to Medic, I shrugged. "Any thoughts in particular?"
"I think we need to work on getting other things done." he replied, staring flatly at the half-finished Duplet at the side of my desk. "Like money. We can't use this crap when we go to the Fall- we'll get our asses kicked."
Moving away from my workbench, I started pacing towards the common area where our collected notebooks were piling up. Shiro and Medic's prophetic takes on the future, Winged's engineering manuals, Kyram's detailed accounts of how little we had… it was all there. Glitch and Spectral sat around the shin-high table sipping beer and tea respectively, so Medic and I joined them.
"Trying to figure out where we're going?" Glitch asked moderately, looking at me with that weather eye that made me remember why he stuck with this mad plan.
"Pretty much." I grumbled, flopping down. "We have the top of the mountain we're staring at-"
"-The Fall?" Spectral asked. I nodded.
"And we're just fucking spinning our wheels." I griped.
"Well, twenty-ish people with shotguns won't make a damn difference in the Fall." Medic opined professionally. "Not unless it was at exactly the right place and time… and we don't know when that is."
"We know the time and place, down to about twenty-four hours." I replied. "It'll have to be enough. The question is, though, what do we need to do?"
"We can't hold still- that's asking for trouble." Spectral said carefully. "The Grimm would just wash over us, which is why we're building a technical."
"May it be the first of many." I griped. "We can't fight as dynamically as Huntsmen, so we need to make up for that. Thus technicals. Grimm, meanwhile, need a lot of dakka to put down, thus heavy weapons on the technicals. How this helps us deal with a stoplock computer virus across a vector of attack none of us can stop, though…"
"So we don't fight the computer virus, we fight the White Fang and the Grimm on the ground." Glitch said, shrugging. "Once we figure out how to get everyone there."
"Which is probably Bullheads or an air freighter. Probably the lower end ones, since we saw Weiss take one that looked like a shit-brick." Spec replied, sketching one out. "Bullheads are around the size of a single squad transport copter, except with wings… Like what do you call them? A Blackhawk? Freighters are a lot bigger, looked about the size of a DC-7 ish? Only lots more vertical than horizontal, still, pretty fucking big."
"We can't steal those, though." Glitch shot back. "And we're not getting cash fast, and trying to serve as ersatz Hunters is way too risky."
"Serving as mercenaries would be a mess, since they'd probably try and hire us as Pinkertons." Medic said, frowning. "We'd never stay together if we tried."
"None of us would stand it." I said flatly. "Hell, we'd have an easier time getting Morgue to help us start a revolution in the Dust Mines."
As Spec raised a finger, I shot her down. "And no, that probably won't turn a profit. We need that profit."
"So we're selling weapons." Glitcher grumbled. "Which is why you're riding Drake on the topic of getting the guncotton-dust working."
"Exactly!" I shouted. "If we can get the money rolling, we can get the nitro-dust gunpowder going. If that shakes out, we have the technicals cavalry, and can exert ground pressure. We need that ground pressure, or we can't fight in the Fall, presuming we get there because we need a god-damn danegeld to even get into the fucking operating zone!"
"Also, Aura." Spectral said, finger raised as she drank her tea.
"And Aura, which is going to cost out the nose unless someone manages to find fucking Qrow, who may or may not be in our damn operating area and if he finds us, then god damn Ozpin knows about us."
"Fuck." everyone around the table said together.
"And nobody wants that fucking fruit sticking his ivory cane in our shit while engaging in the world's worst game of foreplay with his immortal ex wife." I said venomously, before looking at Spec. "I'm getting that right, thereabouts?"
"Close enough."
"Good." I griped. "Fuck money."
"Speaking of money, did you hear Tobias got a job?" Spectral asked, smirking. "You'll never guess where."
"It doesn't have employee discounts, doesn't it." I grumbled.
"Since it's Schnee Dust Company, no shit." Glitch said, smirking.
"Well, that just makes this even better." I grumbled. "Strypgia can't get his still set up fast enough, because I'm going to need a freaking drink."
"Verdammt, was zur holle ist mit dem Bolzen los?" I heard from the direction of the truck bay. Yeah… vehicles. We were working on that. Having weapons independent of the vehicles was theoretically possible, until I looked at the fact that everything was looking like a case of mobile warfare. As nice as dropping an artillery park down somewhere was, we couldn't effectively perform a mobile mission and protect vulnerable artillery units. As such, this meant that our heavy weapons would need to be mobile, effective at close and medium ranges, and be mounted to the back of trucks.
Our heavy weapons, again presuming we were going to become a company of Hunters, was going to need to include something to handle big threats like the gorilla-thing that Spectral was worried about, or the elephant grimm which I wanted to handle at some point since they were a Natural Barrier to expansion and more importantly probably were hiding a ton of Dust deposits. My memory of RWBY was foggy as hell, but the Schnee monopoly was pretty strong, which meant we'd probably want to break it up without killing anyone.
Well, probably without killing anyone. Murderous intent from some of us aside, the money we needed was probably best found by taking on Grimm. Hunting wasn't particularly lucrative due to the low safety margins and high risk of death, but considering the fact we're working together then the risks should be much lower.
Speaking of risk, we also had to deal with fucking fliers. I hated fliers. They were hard to hit, and got everywhere. More importantly, they had a tendency to be in exactly the wrong place to hit a damaged unit who needed to retreat back to the dust-off zone for medevac and re-arm. That meant we needed an anti-air vehicle. A rocket-armed system wouldn't be very good, since presuming we could build rockets that had the acceleration necessary to actually hit an airborne target, they wouldn't have the fuzing to actually detonate a warhead close enough to have a good percent of kill. This in turn meant guns.
Guns had a lot of options, which was hard. Shell-firing or straight kinetic was one major question, as well as caliber and action. Hitting my head against the table, I took my pencil and paper over to the shop where Winged was working, and squatted down on a tire.
"So, question about the anti-air piece." I said casually. "Any thoughts on what sort of gun do you want to look at?"
"Take a bunch of machine guns, staple them to a frame, add sights." Winged grunted. "We're building a ton of 'em anyway."
"We still need to design said machine-guns, and start building jigs." I countered. "It also depends on if you're building them or me, since I know how to build toggle-locks and you know theory behind roller delay."
"Except neither of us have built machine guns before." Winged replied, grumbling. "Pass me the angle grinder and a cut-off disk, will you? I'm not going to argue with a twelve millimeter bolt any longer than I have to."
Getting the tools, I passed them down while putting in my extra-cheap ear protection. Moments later, a whirring hiss started, sparks flying. Once the cut was done, Winged kept going.
"We need machine guns anyway, and the only other people who would make a standardized one would be Atlas. Incidentally, do you know what caliber those are in?"
"No, but I can ask next time I go to buy Dust." I replied. "Which will be tomorrow, since Error's doing a pretty good job figuring out Dust expansion rates."
"How's that coming, anyway?"
"I'm starting to think we could use freaking sawdust to serve as a fuel; this stuff just does not generate enough pressure!" I complained loudly. "Back home, nine mil would make about two and a half thousand bar pressure; or about four hundred and eighty joules of force on a thirteen caliber barrel. Drake hasn't pulled a pressure scale out of his ass and I'm still trying to figure out how to accurately measure quality of dust, but we're pulling anywhere from one to three hundred joules of energy off a shotgun load of Dust."
I heard a tool clunk to the ground. "What."
"Yeah, it's absurdly low-"
"No, I mean how the hell are you getting a two hundred joule difference in energy per shell? Unless you're guessing your loadings, which I know you're not-"
"-because when I do the packing, if it's overfilled it'll fucking explode-"
"-then there's a massive quality differential of Dust that we're using."
I shrugged, and moved into the workshop where my ammo press was. To make shotgun ammo, all I needed to do was get my raw shotgun shells, set primers in them, and then go over to my measuring set and load the powder and wad. On top of the wad went the shot, a little melted paraffin wax to help hold everything together and watertight the shell, and the thin wax paper cover over top. In Remnant, shotgun shells and other cheap ammo wasn't a plastic case like it was at home: instead, there was a brass cup with the primer, with four prongs sticking up and out, which then had a heavyweight, almost cardboard-like paper over them that was heavily doped with something to make it stiff and water-resistant.
Sighing, I just went to work, Winged coming over to watch as I set a primer and dolloped the resin over it to hold it still.
"The problem, I think." I said as I reached over for the comically large glass phial full of Fire Dust. "Is that we don't have any consistent quality of Dust."
"Are you just buying whatever's on sale?" Winged asked, glaring at the dozens of differently-marked canisters on my shelf.
My silence spoke volumes as I measured out sixty grams of Fire Dust into the little reloading spoon I'd gotten with the "Gun Loading for Dummies" kit, before dumping it into the shell. Carefully grabbing a wooden pin, I pushed it down to seat the powder, and pulled it out before putting in the wad.
"Oh my god you literally bought out the bottom sale shelf didn't you."
"In my defense, I can't read this language for one, and for two I'm being very careful not to mix Dusts together so all my batches remain consistent internally." I griped, filling it with shot and getting ready to heat up the wax. "I don't want to accidentally make an Iowa happen again, where something burns funny or some bullshit interaction happens, and kerblewy."
"And you wrote this all down, right?"
"Of course I wrote all that down!" I complained. "And then, because everyone complains about my handwriting, I got Kyram to copy it down."
Moments later, I heard a rustle. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Kyram there with a clipboard and a look at me like I was going to tell him something important. Instead, I asked a question.
"Did someone pull a shotgun from inventory again or something?"
"Actually, yes." Kyram replied. "Drake grabbed one and ammunition lot 26 while he went out looking for a new warehouse to do his explosive chemistry in."
I creased my brow. "Lot 26… that one got made with powder six… he'll be fine. That one falls pretty average."
"And the below-average lots?" Winged grumbled.
"Test ammo!" I replied, going over to the gunsmithing bench. "I've been working on a Shambler in my free time, and it's only exploded twice so far!"
I could feel a set of eye twitches behind me. Chuckling, I just racked open the action and smiled. "Believe it or not, I do in fact have a method to my madness. The toggle lock breaks low enough for shit ammo, but once the extraction cycle finishes the gun eats spare energy via a second mainspring."
"You are an absolute madman and that will kill you." Winged said, incredibly deadpan.
"If I have to use this, there's probably something already trying to kill me." I replied, racking the action again hard enough to hit the massively stiff buffer spring. "I know how to build toggle-lock madness, I don't have to like it. A saner system would let me go with a box mag instead of this rotary rack, and my barrel length is terrible."
"Just for that, you have to figure out how to get the bed off that damn truck." Winged grumbled. "I'm going back to sorting springs and seeing if someone accidentally grabbed a gun drill. We're not going to be able to use pipe forever."
I shrugged. I could automotive well enough to get the truck bed off, right?
//
In retrospect, getting the truck bed off was mostly done, and only needed a little quality time with the angle grinder to finish off. Once it was free, I conscripted Medic and Morgue to help me heave it off the actual vehicle while we decided what to do next. We knew this thing was getting technical-ized, but the problem was the bed seemed to be nothing but a rusted-out fashion statement, without any structural members in it at all or real load-bearing capability. Underneath was the chassis, though, and it didn't take long to start trying to figure out how we were going to rig this all up.
"I'm thinking we just put a pair of beams on the back, and just mount something firing over the cab." Medic offered, waving his hand at the back. "After that, we weld up a dump bed for us, and we're good."
"That's a good general purpose mount, but it limits traverse." I replied. "Hey, Spectral!"
"Yeah? What is it?"
"How much do you remember about Bullheads?"
"A decent amount. Do you need something on them?"
I shrugged, waving my hand. "Think we can do sling-loading?"
"Yeah, they did it in volume one with shipping containers of dust.."
Grinning, I cracked my neck. "Good to know. That means we can make this thing airmobile."
Medic side-eyed me. "That doesn't answer literally anything." he said carefully. "Much less propose a counter-plan."
"Bear with me a minute." I replied, going over to my notebook.
"You're going to pull out some galaxy brain bullshit on me, aren't you." Medic said, sighing.
"Well yes, but no, but mostly yes." I said, gesturing towards the workshop. "Walk with me?"
"Why not…" Medic muttered. "What's the worst that could go wrong?"
"Anyway, the problem is entirely one of caliber." I explained. "I've been going back and forth with Winged on this, and we're trying to decide how we're doing calibers. I want to do a rifle caliber, and then have a heavy machine gun caliber, and phase out the shotguns as fast as we can."
"Okay…"
"The problem with this, though, is that once we all have our Aura unlocked-"
"-is that we'll want to re-tool for when we actually do have Aura, and want a bigger rifle cartridge." Winged explained from where he was diving through the shoebox marked "springs". "So my idea is just to do everything in rifle caliber, then we totally shut down and re-tool, and then spin up into a bigger cartridge. Also get rid of the shotguns because they're terrible."
"Winged has more logistic simplicity, I have more battlefield utility." I explained, cracking my knuckles and sweeping some crap to the corner of my workbench. "If we do it his way, I only need to build one ammunition production line, and then a little stamp so we can make disintegrating link ammo for the machine guns. If we do it my way, we need two production lines and I need to make fixed link ammunition belts, but we can keep one line running at all times and we won't really ever need to shut down."
Medic looked at me like I was drunk. "Tabac, you do realize you're the only one crazy enough to make ammo, right?"
"Not anymore!" I replied, grinning. "Say hello to our new ammunition loader, Space!"
Space looked up from his Mistrali comic book he'd gotten from somewhere and waved. Pulling him over, I smiled as non-threateningly as possible and grinned.
"From today out, Space is going to be taking over from me in loading shotgun shells! This means I've got time to actually build some mass production tools, I can work with Markus to actually figure out what the fuck this dust is and fix the combustion issues, hell, I can actually get to work with building a pistol line!"
Space blinked as I planted him down in front of the reloading bench next to my workbench. "By the way, we're still at critical ammo levels, and you can help build the forge if you can use up the rest of our Fire Dust by, say, Thursday."
Medic just groaned. "He's a kid, Tab."
I rolled my eyes. "He's also, rather unfortunately, in the habit of eating food and working on stuff."
"I can speak for myself, you know." Space grumbled.
"Then please, do so." I replied. "Otherwise, you're going to end up on the odd jobs patrol or something."
Turning back to Medic, I shrugged. "Any thoughts in particular?"
"I think we need to work on getting other things done." he replied, staring flatly at the half-finished Duplet at the side of my desk. "Like money. We can't use this crap when we go to the Fall- we'll get our asses kicked."
Moving away from my workbench, I started pacing towards the common area where our collected notebooks were piling up. Shiro and Medic's prophetic takes on the future, Winged's engineering manuals, Kyram's detailed accounts of how little we had… it was all there. Glitch and Spectral sat around the shin-high table sipping beer and tea respectively, so Medic and I joined them.
"Trying to figure out where we're going?" Glitch asked moderately, looking at me with that weather eye that made me remember why he stuck with this mad plan.
"Pretty much." I grumbled, flopping down. "We have the top of the mountain we're staring at-"
"-The Fall?" Spectral asked. I nodded.
"And we're just fucking spinning our wheels." I griped.
"Well, twenty-ish people with shotguns won't make a damn difference in the Fall." Medic opined professionally. "Not unless it was at exactly the right place and time… and we don't know when that is."
"We know the time and place, down to about twenty-four hours." I replied. "It'll have to be enough. The question is, though, what do we need to do?"
"We can't hold still- that's asking for trouble." Spectral said carefully. "The Grimm would just wash over us, which is why we're building a technical."
"May it be the first of many." I griped. "We can't fight as dynamically as Huntsmen, so we need to make up for that. Thus technicals. Grimm, meanwhile, need a lot of dakka to put down, thus heavy weapons on the technicals. How this helps us deal with a stoplock computer virus across a vector of attack none of us can stop, though…"
"So we don't fight the computer virus, we fight the White Fang and the Grimm on the ground." Glitch said, shrugging. "Once we figure out how to get everyone there."
"Which is probably Bullheads or an air freighter. Probably the lower end ones, since we saw Weiss take one that looked like a shit-brick." Spec replied, sketching one out. "Bullheads are around the size of a single squad transport copter, except with wings… Like what do you call them? A Blackhawk? Freighters are a lot bigger, looked about the size of a DC-7 ish? Only lots more vertical than horizontal, still, pretty fucking big."
"We can't steal those, though." Glitch shot back. "And we're not getting cash fast, and trying to serve as ersatz Hunters is way too risky."
"Serving as mercenaries would be a mess, since they'd probably try and hire us as Pinkertons." Medic said, frowning. "We'd never stay together if we tried."
"None of us would stand it." I said flatly. "Hell, we'd have an easier time getting Morgue to help us start a revolution in the Dust Mines."
As Spec raised a finger, I shot her down. "And no, that probably won't turn a profit. We need that profit."
"So we're selling weapons." Glitcher grumbled. "Which is why you're riding Drake on the topic of getting the guncotton-dust working."
"Exactly!" I shouted. "If we can get the money rolling, we can get the nitro-dust gunpowder going. If that shakes out, we have the technicals cavalry, and can exert ground pressure. We need that ground pressure, or we can't fight in the Fall, presuming we get there because we need a god-damn danegeld to even get into the fucking operating zone!"
"Also, Aura." Spectral said, finger raised as she drank her tea.
"And Aura, which is going to cost out the nose unless someone manages to find fucking Qrow, who may or may not be in our damn operating area and if he finds us, then god damn Ozpin knows about us."
"Fuck." everyone around the table said together.
"And nobody wants that fucking fruit sticking his ivory cane in our shit while engaging in the world's worst game of foreplay with his immortal ex wife." I said venomously, before looking at Spec. "I'm getting that right, thereabouts?"
"Close enough."
"Good." I griped. "Fuck money."
"Speaking of money, did you hear Tobias got a job?" Spectral asked, smirking. "You'll never guess where."
"It doesn't have employee discounts, doesn't it." I grumbled.
"Since it's Schnee Dust Company, no shit." Glitch said, smirking.
"Well, that just makes this even better." I grumbled. "Strypgia can't get his still set up fast enough, because I'm going to need a freaking drink."
- Location
- The Usual Room
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wait, if Strypgia is in RWBY, what happened to Advice and Trust?
Other then that, I'm assumed and intrigued.
Other then that, I'm assumed and intrigued.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Week 1: Why Are We Here?
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So I wrote a thing.
"You ever wonder why we're here?"
Marcus turned to me with a quirked eyebrow. It was a rather odd question to be asked in the middle of what seemed to be a cross between an open air market and some of the seedier shopping malls either of us had been to, with legitimate vendors in their stalls and shadier dudes in trenchcoats full of watches and other sundry lurking in the corners of the large cave the shopping center was in. It was artificial, clearly, the walls were too smooth to be the product of anything other than a controlled demolition.
Ultimately, he shrugged. "It's one of life's great mysteries, isn't it? I mean, why are we here? Was this whole thing some kind of cosmic coincidence? Was it some god out there deciding that we, of all people were the best people to save this world from all the suffering that occurs?"
It was my turn to stare at the shorter dude next to me.
"What? No, I mean, why are we in this damn market? There were cheaper clothing places farther down the mountain that wouldn't trigger my cleithrophobia. This whole thing could come down at any minute."
He looked around awkwardly. "Oh, yeah. That that would make more sense/. I thought we were doing the bit."
I stared for a second as my brain clicked into place.
"Oh shit we did just do the bit. Huh. Well, that certainly just happened. Huh."
I looked back around. We did, in fact, still need to buy clothing for the group.
Marcus glanced around, and finally noticed an alcove that looked like it sold clothing that wasn't either stolen, shit, or too expensive for the meagre budget we'd acquired by tearing down old, possibly abandoned cars and selling the parts at places like this but somehow even less reputable.
"Let's check that placeout. Has to be something there that we need. It's not like no store can have it, right?"
I agreed, and we continued on into the shop. Hopefully this one would have something that actually fit me. I was a fair bit taller and significantly more broad of shoulder than the majority of people in Mistral, so finding clothing, even of the "ratty knock off band tee shirt" variety that I normally wore, was a bit of a rarity in all honesty.
"Yeah, let's go."
===============================
"You ever wonder why we're here?"
Marcus turned to me with a quirked eyebrow. It was a rather odd question to be asked in the middle of what seemed to be a cross between an open air market and some of the seedier shopping malls either of us had been to, with legitimate vendors in their stalls and shadier dudes in trenchcoats full of watches and other sundry lurking in the corners of the large cave the shopping center was in. It was artificial, clearly, the walls were too smooth to be the product of anything other than a controlled demolition.
Ultimately, he shrugged. "It's one of life's great mysteries, isn't it? I mean, why are we here? Was this whole thing some kind of cosmic coincidence? Was it some god out there deciding that we, of all people were the best people to save this world from all the suffering that occurs?"
It was my turn to stare at the shorter dude next to me.
"What? No, I mean, why are we in this damn market? There were cheaper clothing places farther down the mountain that wouldn't trigger my cleithrophobia. This whole thing could come down at any minute."
He looked around awkwardly. "Oh, yeah. That that would make more sense/. I thought we were doing the bit."
I stared for a second as my brain clicked into place.
"Oh shit we did just do the bit. Huh. Well, that certainly just happened. Huh."
I looked back around. We did, in fact, still need to buy clothing for the group.
Marcus glanced around, and finally noticed an alcove that looked like it sold clothing that wasn't either stolen, shit, or too expensive for the meagre budget we'd acquired by tearing down old, possibly abandoned cars and selling the parts at places like this but somehow even less reputable.
"Let's check that placeout. Has to be something there that we need. It's not like no store can have it, right?"
I agreed, and we continued on into the shop. Hopefully this one would have something that actually fit me. I was a fair bit taller and significantly more broad of shoulder than the majority of people in Mistral, so finding clothing, even of the "ratty knock off band tee shirt" variety that I normally wore, was a bit of a rarity in all honesty.
"Yeah, let's go."
Week 2
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Sitting on a stool we'd scrounged up, I sighed dramatically. My hair had gone absolutely nuts last night, and as nice as having great piles of hair was to wave in the air, it also had problems. Like the fact I'd slept back to back with Shiro, and it had taken twenty minutes to get us untangled after. Thus, I was getting my mane barbered half to death by Medic, who had somehow gotten a pair of shears and was going ham.
"You know, ow, that you could be a bit more gentle." I grumbled as Medic combed out another bit before shearing it off. "Christ, you're nearly taking off my ears!"
"Well maybe you shouldn't have shanghai'd the forcible entry and car cutting specialist to be your barber." I heard Medic mutter under his breath. "I'm at the top of your head and just trying to find out where this grey streak starts at-"
"Ow!" I yelled again. "What was that!"
There was a moment of silence as Medic stopped. "Shiro?" he asked. "Are you seeing this too?"
A moment later, I felt Shiro stroking my head too. "Yep."
"Seriously, guys?" I asked. "Seriously?"
"Well, Tabac, how do I put this." Medic said, before Shiro patted me.
"You have gray cat ears." she said. "Which are eminently scratchable."
I would have started arguing with them, but as she poked around up there, one of my hands crept up. I had cat ears. I also had normal ears. Now that I had some of the hair gone, I could also hear out of my cat ears, and holy fucking shit. Wincing a little, I glared at the wall and screwed my eyes shut as I frantically tried to ballance things. I now had two very different audio channels pouring into my head, and more importantly I could direct one. As I fished around with my new ears, I groaned. This was… difficult.
"Hold your ears still, Tabac." Medic grumbled. "I'll just finish trimming down the front, and the back can get trimmed at the shoulder. That'll be enough, right?"
"Sure." I grumbled. "Just… arg."
Once Medic was done, I took the time to go back to our small bathroom. In the grungy mirror, I tried to figure out my new features. The ears were about eight centimeters tall, standing up with round tips and slight fluffs of bobcat-like trailing. They were pretty far back on my head, the muscles for their direction being down close to my neck somehow. They had pretty good rotation, even if it was somewhat dodgy how I could turn them completely around- and hear the sounds of Winged's car tinkering through the thin wooden door.
Coming out, I groaned. This was going to add a whole new level of headache to our stuff wasn't it?
///
As I sat around the drawing board we'd scrounged up next to a sewing machine, I looked at Error with an annoyed glare.
"Is there literally anyone else here who can sew?" I asked, glaring at the patch design. "I'm still working on fixing our desperate lack of local clothing."
"You're working on coats." Error replied as one of my new ears twitched angrily. "We really don't need coats right now, especially uniform coats that may or may not make us look like Nazis. Even acknowledging the locals probably wouldn't recognize the aesthetic as such."
Sighing, I picked up another army blanket, sketching out the cuts I needed to make to start work on the next coat. "We really do need coats, since this place looks like a temperate rainforest. When it starts raining cats and dogs, you'll all thank me for having something that won't get cold when it's wet as hell out."
"Leaving aside that a bunch of us have coats already, plus the fact that there's not much rain at the moment, we need people beating the street." Error shot back. "We found Owl, who got dragged here by a completely separate interaction with Truck-kun, and Drake is still missing in action."
"We have people beating the street! Tortuga and Sov are out there, and Marcus is leaving notes with everyone he's been shopping at."
As Error started putting his head in his hands, I moved over to the table we'd elected to use for general crafts like sewing. Taking up the shears I was using, it didn't take long to get the wool cut to size. After that came out the absolutely ancient old sewing machine I'd found. When I said 'ancient', I did not mean merely slightly old. No, I meant this was ancient enough that it was originally belt-driven off a communal driveshaft. It hadn't taken too much work to make a little pedal for it, though, and while it wasn't my Singer it would certainly work well enough.
"I still feel like this isn't really a priority." Error grumbled. "You could at least make more guns?"
"Out of parts, and we're well stocked on shotguns." I replied. "Thirty of the darn things are more than enough, and since we're going through some miniscule number of rounds a week I don't even need to work on automating the ammunition production more than I already have."
"The truck?"
"Is Winged's baby, and I'm not touching that unless something comes up." I replied. "Also how we rig out the back is still up for debate until we actually figure out the machine gun question. You might get me into working on a drop press, but that's going to be a while out- I don't want it to break and kill someone."
Grumbling, Error leaned against one of the walls Kyram had been putting up frantically and somewhat maniacally. It was nice, having rooms now. "Well, the good news is I finished the prep work on my Dust analysis." he replied.
"Oh?"
"I had to work backwards by… a lot, really, but basically the issue is Fire Dust isn't fire as in flame but fire as in heat." Error said, grinning. "More importantly, I might have accidentally blown up a shed somewhere, and found you some good shit. We might need the truck to get all of it."
I raised an eyebrow, but followed along. Before we left, though, I grabbed my Shambler and a pouch full of shotgun shells from the armory. Loading the clips idly as we went out, I watched Error pull out 'his' shotgun too for the trip. We weren't horribly worried, but as we started hiking out I looked up at the sky. Dark clouds pulsed overhead, and I glared at them mightily. Getting wet was not going to be fun.
Error's House of Explosions was about three blocks away, which was exactly enough time for it to start drizzling lightly. He'd been working out of an old tooling shed it looked like, although considering how dark it was my first thought was a house of horror. Opening the door quietly before flicking on a light, I got a good look at the workshop. Weights and measures lay about here and there, while a few half-discharged vials of dust sat in a clever little holding rack. Next to it, though, was a blasted-up section of floor.
"I was doing some mixing, trying to figure out if we could make a more powerful Dust like you'd suggested." Error said carefully, sticking his gun's muzzle down towards the hole. "Well, charcoal worked pretty well, but I ended up cracking the cement slab under the place. When I started digging through the rubble, though…"
As he jumped down, I followed him into the pile of rubble. We had found ourselves in a small cast cement vault, faded paint on the walls in a mixture of bright patterns and Mistrali calligraphy. Front and center in the room was a large, coffin-like case with latches holding it shut. I didn't need to read Mistrali to figure out what was written on the lid, though: the same thing that was on every bottle of dust we'd bought. A snowflake, a fire symbol, and an explosion- or in other words, Dust. Working carefully with Error, we finagled the cache open. Inside were three weapons, each carefully wrapped in oilcloth. The first was a long polearm, feeling like a glaive as I picked it up and swung it idly. It was a masterful weapon, ebony-wood haft inlaid with fine wire wrap and the head decorated with wonderful engravings. It was almost a work of art as much as it was a weapon. Next to it was a shotgun, blued carefully, with the same wire-wrap on the stock and forend. Lastly was a shield, a trio of blood-red moons set into it with their shatter patterns facing away to form a triangle-like halo of debris.
"Some Huntsman's cache." I muttered, picking up the polearm before feeling the edge. Still sharp as a razor. "Probably an old one, too. Certainly older than this part of the city."
"How can you tell?" Error asked as he picked up the shotgun, his own rested against the side of the chest.
I pointed at the ceiling, and more importantly over at where we'd gotten in. "This place is built like a cast concrete Quonset hut: a half-circle shell, with the ends open. If you hand me your flashlight, I'll bet money that the ends of this are wood. If you're from Mantle and need to build a quick barack or a shed for something and have a standardization boner…"
"...then you just dump one of these down and presto." Error muttered. "Then how did it survive when my bomb- er, blast test, blew open the pad of the stockroom?"
"This was probably bomb rated, versus an unreinforced concrete pad." I said, shrugging. "Naturally whoever loaded this up didn't include a cleaning kit or documentation on the shotgun. Fucking Remnant."
"Agreed." Error muttered, before undoing his belt loose enough to cram his Duplet in it. "I'll haul the good loot, since you've got the good gun."
I nodded, before heaving myself out of the hole, cat ears swiveling. The rain had picked up to a dull roar, enough to drown out the sounds of the railways that criss-crossed through parts of this abandoned manufacturing district. The roads were silent as well, the quiet hum of life dead.
Too dead. "Eyes up." I grunted, pulling the toggle back on my Shambler far enough to check there was a shell in the breach. "Something's wrong."
"You hear something?"
"No. I don't hear anything." I grunted. "That's what got me nervous."
As we moved through the town, I didn't see anything. Nobody was out and about, but there wasn't a breath of life. Even the odd flowers growing in the gutters seemed more gray. We were halfway home when I heard the first growl.
"Get your gun out." I hissed. "Grimm."
"We've literally never seen Grimm." Error said as he hauled his gun out and racked the hammers all the way back to set the trigger.
The sound was indescribable. Think of nails on a chalkboard, intensified by the sharpening of a knife. It pierced the soul on a fundamental level, and made the small hairs on my back raise. Slowly shifting my gun into my shoulder, I watched as we moved. Then I saw it- a flash of heartless red. I knew enough gunplay to turn my entire body, putting my foot back as I pulled the trigger. The flash was bright as I shot, buck grazing the night-black form. Then it charged.
If I had any degree of training, I'd say it was Beowulf. I didn't, though, so the second the sight was on target I pulled the trigger again and again. The Grimm was screaming now, with Error dumping both barrels into it quickly before snapping the gun open to reload. I put one last shot in its head before it started dissolving, prompting us to both breath a little easier.
"C'mon, we need to get back to base!" Error yelled, visibly rattled. "Move!"
I won't say I ran all the way home, but I certainly didn't stop running after I reloaded the Shambler. Crashing into the warehouse, we slammed the door shut as quickly as we could.
"Strype!" I yelled. "Strype, damnit, start passing out guns! We've got Grimm!"
The base went into overdrive the moment I said that. Strypgia, being closest to the armory and the one I figured was most responsible, started dumping shotgun ammo into poches and handing them out with the guns. Everyone was looking nervous as all hell, and I heard a muttering.
"You've got safeties on these, right?" Spoder asked as he loaded his.
"Nope." I replied, glaring at the walls as I tried to listen. "The safety is called 'keepsies the finger off the trigger' because these guns are literally built out of shit we dug out of a hole."
"Where do you need me?" I heard another voice ask- Tobias? Probably Tobias.
"Back door by the tool shop, right side of the door." I barked. "Glitch, you're with him, don't stack up tight enough to muzzle sweep. Error, Spoder, storage bay, cover the rolling door. Winged, Medic, chem lab door. Shiro, get the medical supplies and-"
"-and nothing." Shiro replied, loading her shotgun with a practiced air. "We'll worry about casualties when this is over."
As it turned out, I was both a properly paranoid and a pain in the ass. The Grimm avoided our warehouse for some reason even though I could hear them outside, and it was a few hours before the noises finally stopped. We did keep an armed watch that night, though, and nobody slept too far from their guns.
///
It was about two days later that I finally finished up the coats, all twenty of them, and got to work sizing them to their intended owners. While I couldn't embroider names into them, I did have a can of spray paint and some stencils. More importantly, I had a bored Strypgia to deal with, and since he and Medic both had the means and desire to do some breaking an entering, I discovered their explorations about twenty minutes after four on Tuesday when they started shooting off locks.
"Good news!" Strype yelled, coming in through the back door, absolutely reeking of Fire dust and a slight stench of rotting wood. "Figured out what the neighboring warehouses have in 'em!"
I looked at my cardboard spray booth, then over at the bored emergency responder and soldier. I needed to deal with this so bad… but I needed to finish my stuff…
"We found an empty one too!" Medic yelled.
Well fuck, time to go get 'em. Getting up to go over to the back door, I grimaced as I looked at the diabolical duo. They were both covered in dust, and Medic was grinning as he held a Haligan he'd scrounged up somewhere. Sighing, I just grabbed one of the guns that had just started to habitually live next to the doors, and followed them out. The warehouses, I noted, were all missing small to medium large chunks of door, and I didn't need to guess why. They also had numbers spray-painted on them, for identification purposes. Of course.
"And behind door #1," Medic said, grinning, "is our empty warehouse."
"Truely, such a wonderful discovery." I griped. "The hell are we supposed to do with it, though?"
Medic and Strypgia shrugged at me in unison. "Alright, forget I asked." I grumbled. "Next one?"
"Behind door number two," Strypgia said, "is an entire warehouse full of concrete!"
Poking my nose in, I just stared. Pallets of concrete stared back at me. "We're back to the 'what the hell are we gonna use it for' question." I said, sighing. "We don't need to build anything with it, it's not gonna get used for applique armor since we're not likely to get shot at, the space is full…"
"That one, I actually have an answer for." Stryp said, chuckling. "The rest of these buildings are mostly full of scrap, and this place is fairly abandoned. We can probably start casting some basic fortifications, provided we make them fancy-looking enough, and nobody will notice. At the very least, if the White Fang show up, you'll have a safe space to duck after negotiations break down."
"Well at least I don't have to see what's behind Door #3 then." I said, sighing in relief. "We'll hold a vote on what to use the second warehouse for before Kyram eats it for paperwork storage or Winged turns it into an auto garage, and then get to work on sprucing it up."
"There might have actually been an auto lift in the… sixth? Sixth warehouse." Medic said offhandedly.
"Right, I'll put Winged on it." I said, sighing. "In the meantime, Morgue can handle fortifying the area. I'm sure he'll have a blast."
"Speaking of blasts…" Medic said, before I held up a hand.
"Do you want to know." I said, deadpan. "Because trust me on this, the left hand and the right hand are not getting into a yelling contest. Error figured out how to get us enhanced gunpowder, and you've boosted five trucks so far so we actually have transportation and parts to sell. We're even keeping one for technical construction. Comprende?"
"Si, signore." Stryp said, laughing. "Speaking of technicals, did Winged show you what came into the gun shop when Spoder and Marcus got back from the hardware store?"
"No…" I said slowly, fearing for my sanity. Turning around, I went back inside, over to one of the workbenches. On it were dozens of happy little bolts and bolt carriers. More important was the giant stamp that Winged was looking at like it held the secrets to the universe, smiling slightly.
"Hey, Tabac." He said, grinning. I just shuddered.
"Winged, I can tell you that this is a bad idea." I said. "I can smell it. It smells like 'I don't want to even think about building a drop press' and 'I don't know if we can ghetto together a Kalash from this' and 'Weren't you looking at making a G3 clone anyway'."
"They sell gun parts at the hardware store." Winged said, grinning. "They sell roller delay mechanisms at the hardware store. Now, we'll have to tinker with them a little, but I firmly believe I can figure out how to make them work. In the meantime, since a gas-operated gun can be calibrated a little easier, we've got blanks for a generic gas operated receiver."
I sighed. This was going to be a headache. Now I had even more shit to do.
"I'll get to work on it in the morning, and we'll see if Tortuga and Space can get to work on a drop press." I grumbled. "Did we standardize on a rifle caliber?"
"6.5x50 millimeter." Winged said.
"Rimmed?"
"No, rimless. Why would we go rimmed? This feeds our assault rifles too."
"Yeah and I need to figure out whether I'm doing a pull out or a push through or what have you. I'm thinking something halfway between a Hotchkiss feed and an Mg.42, but it's one of those things I'm not so sure on."
Winged looked at me like I had just suggested cats and dogs, cohabitating in peace and harmony. "You're not using a feed strip. I refuse."
I grumbled, going over to get some butcher paper to draw on. "No, I mean like a push through. If we put the belt advancer on the bottom, then we can just run it straight off the gas piston like sensible people, but then I'm getting stuck on the feed."
"Just have a hinge top. Literally the simplest thing in the world."
"I'm not sure if we can make the frame strong enough." I replied. "I know, I know, we can work it out in testing, but I don't want to throw a perfectly good bolt group away."
"If the frame isn't strong enough even with making it out of twelve gauge steel then we have so many other problems it's not even worth looking at building another!" Winged snapped, slamming his desk.
I sighed, sweeping my hair back. "Sorry. I'm just in a million places right now."
Winged glared at me, so I just turned myself back to the bench. Some quick sketching got me the gas piston mechanism and a simple gas block and tube arrangement laid out, then an attachment to the bolt carrier to interface with the piston. I'd probably tie the two together with a pin or rivet. Once that was done, I needed a surface to let the bolt run in. If I made it a rail on the receiver… then I'd need to have something to put the bolt carrier in. Hmm. Maybe if I put the bolt carrier in a piston interface that would ride on a pair of rails stamped into the receiver? If I did that, it would just be easier to build the entire piston and weld it to the piston interface and make it just one part with the bolt carrier.
Yeah, that would work. I'd have to make it an open bolt to get enough clearance to put the belt in, but this was a machine gun. Open bolt was practically a requirement, unless we wanted to hang this off the front of a prop plane. The issue was finding a way to do the belt advancer, though. If I advanced it on the backstroke, though… then I'd need to figure out which way to eject so the round coming in didn't interfere. I couldn't advance on the forestroke, though, since the round had to be in position on the forestroke so the round could get picked up out of the disintegrating link. Which reminded me…
"We're going for fully disintegrating, right?" I yelled at Winged, who'd started up the lathe for something.
"WHAT?!"
"DISINTEGRATING BELT YES?"
"YES SECTIONED BELT!"
"NO, FULLY DISINTEGRATING."
Shutting down the lathe, Winged came over. "I thought we were using twenty-five round sectioned belts."
"Yes, I thought we were using disintegrating belts of twenty five rounds." I said.
It took a solid minute of staring at each other before groaning.
"Morgue!" I yelled.
"WHAT?"
Since he obviously wasn't doing anything important, I went over to where we'd put down Strypgia's still. Since we were basically cooking off camp stoves, it hadn't been hard to move the kitchen to surround it. There I found Morgue cooking something that looked mildly kosher, with Shiro making bread nearby.
"So disintegrating belts or sectioned belts?" I asked casually, making sure to stay out of range of Shiro's glare. She'd been a baker, and food prep cleanliness was important to her and I was covered in shop crap. True love did not trump keeping my grease-covered mits out of her kitchen.
"Sectioned."
Looks like I'd been outvoted. A sectioned belt would be a bit more of a pain to make, since we'd need to pin everything together, but we could always reuse old ones. That also meant I'd need to design a belt link, though, and… balls. By the time I'd get done with all this, I wouldn't be able to keep making coats. The rainy season would be soon, and I didn't want to let anyone come down with hypothermia because we were all still rocking midweight summerwear and windbreakers. The longer we could keep Shiro and Medic from having to do first aid and medical care, the better.
///
I'd really thought I'd worked all the surprises out for the week, I really did. Spectral had started teaching basic swordplay and Stryp was working on firearms instruction. The food issue was mostly solved. Kyram had yet to go full office gremlin, and had even scrounged up a filthy old typewriter to keep notes on. I'd even prototyped out a one-pin metal belt design we could start making once the drop press got figured out, and Winged was working on the new rifles as we spoke. I'd even managed to slap together a mass production setup for the new rifle ammo, as soon as we started batch producing it.
"Tabac!" Tobias said, coming up to the sewing machine as I finished up another coat. "I have good news!"
Oh no.
"What is it, then?" I asked, finishing the seam and popping the clutch out. Yes, I put in a clutch for my sewing machine. Don't judge.
"I got a job at the Dust store!"
Turning around, I gaped at him. "Which one?"
"The Schnee one! Up in Yangzhen, by the river."
My eyes narrowed. We'd been slowly making an informal map of the city as compared to the formal maps, which were distinctly lacking in information that we needed. We were nominally in Huangsongyu, which was an old town that got absorbed, turned into manufacturing, and then abandoned.
"Yangzhen's nearly eight kilometers uphill of here, Tobias." I said carefully. "How did you get a job there?"
More importantly, Yangzhen was also a Nice Part of Town, which meant it was actively defended. In Mistral, that defense came in the form of staggering elevation and firebreak zones with walls behind them. Areas that weren't actively protected, like ours, were what we theorized as being a form of entangling and temporalizing ground: by pulling the civilians out, the Grimm could be lured into a confusing morass, which would then turn a charging horde into a steady trickle to move into a beaten zone and then get killed off with aimed rifle fire. Since we were in ablative territory, that meant the long arm of the law was about as long as Baka's. Our less than legal activities wouldn't draw any official reprise, as long as we didn't go too far from home or try to work inside the city limits. On the other hand, people from further up the hill would default to assuming we were at best an illegal immigrant, and at worst part of the Triads.
Tobias just laughed at me. ""Atlesian ist, aus irgendeinem Grund, nur Deutsch mit einem seltsamen Akzent! Die haben mich eingestellt ohne groß fragen zu stellen, ich glaube die dachten ich währe einer von Ihnen.""
I looked at him. "Pero no hablo alemania, Tobias. English, man English."
"So Atlas? They just speak German." he said, grinning. "Kinda weird German, but German. And I speak German!"
"Winged will be absolutely thrilled to hear this, I'm sure." I said calmly, before going back to my sewing. "Do you get an employee discount?"
"I pay cost for the first thousand lien of purchases a month, yeah." Tobias said, chuckling. "More importantly, I make five percent commission! With the amount of Dust your average Hunter buys, we'll be set in no time!"
"Then how much did you make today?" I grumbled, kicking the clutch back in and stopped rocking to brake the speed back down. When I got moving, my sewing table could go just as fast as my old Husquavarna- which was quite a bit faster than I could feed it!
"Oh, about four thousand Lien."
My hands froze up, and my feet stopped moving. As the belt squealed, I turned to look at Tobias. That was… a lot of money. A lot of money. My eyes were widening, and before I knew it I was on my feet and grinning.
"SPECTRAL! SHIRO! MARCUS!" I yelled. "SHOPPING RUN TIME!"
Three heads came out from around the side of the wall, grinning. "Food?" one of them asked, I couldn't tell which.
"Meat's back on the menu, boys!" I yelled, grinning. "Tobias has just volunteered to get our diets back on track, and-"
I was cut off as Tobias was dragged from the room like a war trophy, Spoder joining in the mass run to the Tairjet in the one working strip mall around here. Even in Remnant, there was big box retail. With that done, I sighed, and sat back down to start sewing. I had work to do.
////
It was on Wednesday that things went wrong. Specifically, I ran out of thread, and if I didn't want to pay horrible prices from our limited budget I'd need to wait until the flea market got called on Friday. As such, I had time to go work on the technical with Winged. Between the two of us, we'd knocked together a plan for a gun that was halfway between a Hotchkiss and a PK to serve as our machine gun. While Winged welded and milled out the bolt carrier, I got to work hand-forging the receiver. To do that, I needed to get our anvil, a square peg, and a good chunk of sheet steel that I could afford to get hot.
Once that was ready, I needed to get to work. The receiver was going to be basically a piece of c-channel with some cuts on it, so I started there. The next step was going to be flattening the guide rails on it, and then my time forging it was done. Just in case, though, I banged out three more. Once they were done cooling, I would get to work with the drill press and metal saw to cut the slots in them for the trigger group and a few other parts, but until then I was going to work on the other sheet steel components. It would take a day or two, but I was going to end up finishing a lot of the covers and lugs. The other thing I was going to be building were some of the rivet-on components, like the sight rails for a scope one day. Winged would probably finish up with his components tomorrow, and then I'd do assembly. Until then, I was on truck duty with Glitch.
A week into our ownership of the truck, and it looked totally different. We'd pulled the old bed, chopped off most of the bodywork, and been steadily replacing bits and pieces as we boosted abandoned cars and salvaged them for saleable parts. We'd put on a new bed and front end out of sheet metal, fresh doors that weren't rotted out on the bottom, and new headlights. My suggestion to just use wooden superstructure for that was roundly rejected, with Winged trying to brain me with a bottle of flux as I ran, laughing. Now I was working on bolting in the tripod we were going to be mounting the machine guns on.
The big thing that people thought of in our world when they heard "truck with a gun in it" was some idiot throwing a machine gun bipod on the roof of a truck and letting rip. This was dumb. What we were going to do was build actual tripods, albeit simple ones, bolt them into the truck bed for stable rests, and then put the machine guns in them. If I had the time and Winged had the inclination, we could even build proper pintle mounts at some point so we could tack some gun shields in there.
Of course, we still had to bolt the darn things in, which meant I had to bolt them in. Grumbling and swearing, I just got the eight mil tap and got to work. Two turns in, one turn back, for-fucking-ever. At least Space had already built the tripod. By the time I was done, it was dinnertime, which meant washing up. Getting to the sink outside the bathroom, I grumbled as I tried to scrub off the oil from the day. By the time I was done, everyone else had gathered around the mess hall table, where there were massive pots of stew and half a slab of roast beef. Banging on her glass from the head of the table, Spectral grinned.
"Alright, everyone!" Spectral said, smiling. "We've finally got a date for where we are!"
As I got a bowl of chilli, everyone settled down. "So, we figured out based on the fact it's three weeks to when Haven takes in it's new class and when the last Vytal festival was and when it's next scheduled, we're about two weeks before the start of RWBY volume one. We have nine months, approximately, until the Fall of Beacon."
The table broke into conversation for a minute, before Spectral banged on her glass. "Hey! Hold on! We've got time, calm down!"
Standing up, I started to speak. "We still need to figure out what to do, and when to show our hand. We're getting prepared, and with recent discoveries it's coming along quite well, but we still need to plan carefully. The curtain only goes up once- and when it does, we need to be ready to change the world."
"You know, ow, that you could be a bit more gentle." I grumbled as Medic combed out another bit before shearing it off. "Christ, you're nearly taking off my ears!"
"Well maybe you shouldn't have shanghai'd the forcible entry and car cutting specialist to be your barber." I heard Medic mutter under his breath. "I'm at the top of your head and just trying to find out where this grey streak starts at-"
"Ow!" I yelled again. "What was that!"
There was a moment of silence as Medic stopped. "Shiro?" he asked. "Are you seeing this too?"
A moment later, I felt Shiro stroking my head too. "Yep."
"Seriously, guys?" I asked. "Seriously?"
"Well, Tabac, how do I put this." Medic said, before Shiro patted me.
"You have gray cat ears." she said. "Which are eminently scratchable."
I would have started arguing with them, but as she poked around up there, one of my hands crept up. I had cat ears. I also had normal ears. Now that I had some of the hair gone, I could also hear out of my cat ears, and holy fucking shit. Wincing a little, I glared at the wall and screwed my eyes shut as I frantically tried to ballance things. I now had two very different audio channels pouring into my head, and more importantly I could direct one. As I fished around with my new ears, I groaned. This was… difficult.
"Hold your ears still, Tabac." Medic grumbled. "I'll just finish trimming down the front, and the back can get trimmed at the shoulder. That'll be enough, right?"
"Sure." I grumbled. "Just… arg."
Once Medic was done, I took the time to go back to our small bathroom. In the grungy mirror, I tried to figure out my new features. The ears were about eight centimeters tall, standing up with round tips and slight fluffs of bobcat-like trailing. They were pretty far back on my head, the muscles for their direction being down close to my neck somehow. They had pretty good rotation, even if it was somewhat dodgy how I could turn them completely around- and hear the sounds of Winged's car tinkering through the thin wooden door.
Coming out, I groaned. This was going to add a whole new level of headache to our stuff wasn't it?
///
As I sat around the drawing board we'd scrounged up next to a sewing machine, I looked at Error with an annoyed glare.
"Is there literally anyone else here who can sew?" I asked, glaring at the patch design. "I'm still working on fixing our desperate lack of local clothing."
"You're working on coats." Error replied as one of my new ears twitched angrily. "We really don't need coats right now, especially uniform coats that may or may not make us look like Nazis. Even acknowledging the locals probably wouldn't recognize the aesthetic as such."
Sighing, I picked up another army blanket, sketching out the cuts I needed to make to start work on the next coat. "We really do need coats, since this place looks like a temperate rainforest. When it starts raining cats and dogs, you'll all thank me for having something that won't get cold when it's wet as hell out."
"Leaving aside that a bunch of us have coats already, plus the fact that there's not much rain at the moment, we need people beating the street." Error shot back. "We found Owl, who got dragged here by a completely separate interaction with Truck-kun, and Drake is still missing in action."
"We have people beating the street! Tortuga and Sov are out there, and Marcus is leaving notes with everyone he's been shopping at."
As Error started putting his head in his hands, I moved over to the table we'd elected to use for general crafts like sewing. Taking up the shears I was using, it didn't take long to get the wool cut to size. After that came out the absolutely ancient old sewing machine I'd found. When I said 'ancient', I did not mean merely slightly old. No, I meant this was ancient enough that it was originally belt-driven off a communal driveshaft. It hadn't taken too much work to make a little pedal for it, though, and while it wasn't my Singer it would certainly work well enough.
"I still feel like this isn't really a priority." Error grumbled. "You could at least make more guns?"
"Out of parts, and we're well stocked on shotguns." I replied. "Thirty of the darn things are more than enough, and since we're going through some miniscule number of rounds a week I don't even need to work on automating the ammunition production more than I already have."
"The truck?"
"Is Winged's baby, and I'm not touching that unless something comes up." I replied. "Also how we rig out the back is still up for debate until we actually figure out the machine gun question. You might get me into working on a drop press, but that's going to be a while out- I don't want it to break and kill someone."
Grumbling, Error leaned against one of the walls Kyram had been putting up frantically and somewhat maniacally. It was nice, having rooms now. "Well, the good news is I finished the prep work on my Dust analysis." he replied.
"Oh?"
"I had to work backwards by… a lot, really, but basically the issue is Fire Dust isn't fire as in flame but fire as in heat." Error said, grinning. "More importantly, I might have accidentally blown up a shed somewhere, and found you some good shit. We might need the truck to get all of it."
I raised an eyebrow, but followed along. Before we left, though, I grabbed my Shambler and a pouch full of shotgun shells from the armory. Loading the clips idly as we went out, I watched Error pull out 'his' shotgun too for the trip. We weren't horribly worried, but as we started hiking out I looked up at the sky. Dark clouds pulsed overhead, and I glared at them mightily. Getting wet was not going to be fun.
Error's House of Explosions was about three blocks away, which was exactly enough time for it to start drizzling lightly. He'd been working out of an old tooling shed it looked like, although considering how dark it was my first thought was a house of horror. Opening the door quietly before flicking on a light, I got a good look at the workshop. Weights and measures lay about here and there, while a few half-discharged vials of dust sat in a clever little holding rack. Next to it, though, was a blasted-up section of floor.
"I was doing some mixing, trying to figure out if we could make a more powerful Dust like you'd suggested." Error said carefully, sticking his gun's muzzle down towards the hole. "Well, charcoal worked pretty well, but I ended up cracking the cement slab under the place. When I started digging through the rubble, though…"
As he jumped down, I followed him into the pile of rubble. We had found ourselves in a small cast cement vault, faded paint on the walls in a mixture of bright patterns and Mistrali calligraphy. Front and center in the room was a large, coffin-like case with latches holding it shut. I didn't need to read Mistrali to figure out what was written on the lid, though: the same thing that was on every bottle of dust we'd bought. A snowflake, a fire symbol, and an explosion- or in other words, Dust. Working carefully with Error, we finagled the cache open. Inside were three weapons, each carefully wrapped in oilcloth. The first was a long polearm, feeling like a glaive as I picked it up and swung it idly. It was a masterful weapon, ebony-wood haft inlaid with fine wire wrap and the head decorated with wonderful engravings. It was almost a work of art as much as it was a weapon. Next to it was a shotgun, blued carefully, with the same wire-wrap on the stock and forend. Lastly was a shield, a trio of blood-red moons set into it with their shatter patterns facing away to form a triangle-like halo of debris.
"Some Huntsman's cache." I muttered, picking up the polearm before feeling the edge. Still sharp as a razor. "Probably an old one, too. Certainly older than this part of the city."
"How can you tell?" Error asked as he picked up the shotgun, his own rested against the side of the chest.
I pointed at the ceiling, and more importantly over at where we'd gotten in. "This place is built like a cast concrete Quonset hut: a half-circle shell, with the ends open. If you hand me your flashlight, I'll bet money that the ends of this are wood. If you're from Mantle and need to build a quick barack or a shed for something and have a standardization boner…"
"...then you just dump one of these down and presto." Error muttered. "Then how did it survive when my bomb- er, blast test, blew open the pad of the stockroom?"
"This was probably bomb rated, versus an unreinforced concrete pad." I said, shrugging. "Naturally whoever loaded this up didn't include a cleaning kit or documentation on the shotgun. Fucking Remnant."
"Agreed." Error muttered, before undoing his belt loose enough to cram his Duplet in it. "I'll haul the good loot, since you've got the good gun."
I nodded, before heaving myself out of the hole, cat ears swiveling. The rain had picked up to a dull roar, enough to drown out the sounds of the railways that criss-crossed through parts of this abandoned manufacturing district. The roads were silent as well, the quiet hum of life dead.
Too dead. "Eyes up." I grunted, pulling the toggle back on my Shambler far enough to check there was a shell in the breach. "Something's wrong."
"You hear something?"
"No. I don't hear anything." I grunted. "That's what got me nervous."
As we moved through the town, I didn't see anything. Nobody was out and about, but there wasn't a breath of life. Even the odd flowers growing in the gutters seemed more gray. We were halfway home when I heard the first growl.
"Get your gun out." I hissed. "Grimm."
"We've literally never seen Grimm." Error said as he hauled his gun out and racked the hammers all the way back to set the trigger.
The sound was indescribable. Think of nails on a chalkboard, intensified by the sharpening of a knife. It pierced the soul on a fundamental level, and made the small hairs on my back raise. Slowly shifting my gun into my shoulder, I watched as we moved. Then I saw it- a flash of heartless red. I knew enough gunplay to turn my entire body, putting my foot back as I pulled the trigger. The flash was bright as I shot, buck grazing the night-black form. Then it charged.
If I had any degree of training, I'd say it was Beowulf. I didn't, though, so the second the sight was on target I pulled the trigger again and again. The Grimm was screaming now, with Error dumping both barrels into it quickly before snapping the gun open to reload. I put one last shot in its head before it started dissolving, prompting us to both breath a little easier.
"C'mon, we need to get back to base!" Error yelled, visibly rattled. "Move!"
I won't say I ran all the way home, but I certainly didn't stop running after I reloaded the Shambler. Crashing into the warehouse, we slammed the door shut as quickly as we could.
"Strype!" I yelled. "Strype, damnit, start passing out guns! We've got Grimm!"
The base went into overdrive the moment I said that. Strypgia, being closest to the armory and the one I figured was most responsible, started dumping shotgun ammo into poches and handing them out with the guns. Everyone was looking nervous as all hell, and I heard a muttering.
"You've got safeties on these, right?" Spoder asked as he loaded his.
"Nope." I replied, glaring at the walls as I tried to listen. "The safety is called 'keepsies the finger off the trigger' because these guns are literally built out of shit we dug out of a hole."
"Where do you need me?" I heard another voice ask- Tobias? Probably Tobias.
"Back door by the tool shop, right side of the door." I barked. "Glitch, you're with him, don't stack up tight enough to muzzle sweep. Error, Spoder, storage bay, cover the rolling door. Winged, Medic, chem lab door. Shiro, get the medical supplies and-"
"-and nothing." Shiro replied, loading her shotgun with a practiced air. "We'll worry about casualties when this is over."
As it turned out, I was both a properly paranoid and a pain in the ass. The Grimm avoided our warehouse for some reason even though I could hear them outside, and it was a few hours before the noises finally stopped. We did keep an armed watch that night, though, and nobody slept too far from their guns.
///
It was about two days later that I finally finished up the coats, all twenty of them, and got to work sizing them to their intended owners. While I couldn't embroider names into them, I did have a can of spray paint and some stencils. More importantly, I had a bored Strypgia to deal with, and since he and Medic both had the means and desire to do some breaking an entering, I discovered their explorations about twenty minutes after four on Tuesday when they started shooting off locks.
"Good news!" Strype yelled, coming in through the back door, absolutely reeking of Fire dust and a slight stench of rotting wood. "Figured out what the neighboring warehouses have in 'em!"
I looked at my cardboard spray booth, then over at the bored emergency responder and soldier. I needed to deal with this so bad… but I needed to finish my stuff…
"We found an empty one too!" Medic yelled.
Well fuck, time to go get 'em. Getting up to go over to the back door, I grimaced as I looked at the diabolical duo. They were both covered in dust, and Medic was grinning as he held a Haligan he'd scrounged up somewhere. Sighing, I just grabbed one of the guns that had just started to habitually live next to the doors, and followed them out. The warehouses, I noted, were all missing small to medium large chunks of door, and I didn't need to guess why. They also had numbers spray-painted on them, for identification purposes. Of course.
"And behind door #1," Medic said, grinning, "is our empty warehouse."
"Truely, such a wonderful discovery." I griped. "The hell are we supposed to do with it, though?"
Medic and Strypgia shrugged at me in unison. "Alright, forget I asked." I grumbled. "Next one?"
"Behind door number two," Strypgia said, "is an entire warehouse full of concrete!"
Poking my nose in, I just stared. Pallets of concrete stared back at me. "We're back to the 'what the hell are we gonna use it for' question." I said, sighing. "We don't need to build anything with it, it's not gonna get used for applique armor since we're not likely to get shot at, the space is full…"
"That one, I actually have an answer for." Stryp said, chuckling. "The rest of these buildings are mostly full of scrap, and this place is fairly abandoned. We can probably start casting some basic fortifications, provided we make them fancy-looking enough, and nobody will notice. At the very least, if the White Fang show up, you'll have a safe space to duck after negotiations break down."
"Well at least I don't have to see what's behind Door #3 then." I said, sighing in relief. "We'll hold a vote on what to use the second warehouse for before Kyram eats it for paperwork storage or Winged turns it into an auto garage, and then get to work on sprucing it up."
"There might have actually been an auto lift in the… sixth? Sixth warehouse." Medic said offhandedly.
"Right, I'll put Winged on it." I said, sighing. "In the meantime, Morgue can handle fortifying the area. I'm sure he'll have a blast."
"Speaking of blasts…" Medic said, before I held up a hand.
"Do you want to know." I said, deadpan. "Because trust me on this, the left hand and the right hand are not getting into a yelling contest. Error figured out how to get us enhanced gunpowder, and you've boosted five trucks so far so we actually have transportation and parts to sell. We're even keeping one for technical construction. Comprende?"
"Si, signore." Stryp said, laughing. "Speaking of technicals, did Winged show you what came into the gun shop when Spoder and Marcus got back from the hardware store?"
"No…" I said slowly, fearing for my sanity. Turning around, I went back inside, over to one of the workbenches. On it were dozens of happy little bolts and bolt carriers. More important was the giant stamp that Winged was looking at like it held the secrets to the universe, smiling slightly.
"Hey, Tabac." He said, grinning. I just shuddered.
"Winged, I can tell you that this is a bad idea." I said. "I can smell it. It smells like 'I don't want to even think about building a drop press' and 'I don't know if we can ghetto together a Kalash from this' and 'Weren't you looking at making a G3 clone anyway'."
"They sell gun parts at the hardware store." Winged said, grinning. "They sell roller delay mechanisms at the hardware store. Now, we'll have to tinker with them a little, but I firmly believe I can figure out how to make them work. In the meantime, since a gas-operated gun can be calibrated a little easier, we've got blanks for a generic gas operated receiver."
I sighed. This was going to be a headache. Now I had even more shit to do.
"I'll get to work on it in the morning, and we'll see if Tortuga and Space can get to work on a drop press." I grumbled. "Did we standardize on a rifle caliber?"
"6.5x50 millimeter." Winged said.
"Rimmed?"
"No, rimless. Why would we go rimmed? This feeds our assault rifles too."
"Yeah and I need to figure out whether I'm doing a pull out or a push through or what have you. I'm thinking something halfway between a Hotchkiss feed and an Mg.42, but it's one of those things I'm not so sure on."
Winged looked at me like I had just suggested cats and dogs, cohabitating in peace and harmony. "You're not using a feed strip. I refuse."
I grumbled, going over to get some butcher paper to draw on. "No, I mean like a push through. If we put the belt advancer on the bottom, then we can just run it straight off the gas piston like sensible people, but then I'm getting stuck on the feed."
"Just have a hinge top. Literally the simplest thing in the world."
"I'm not sure if we can make the frame strong enough." I replied. "I know, I know, we can work it out in testing, but I don't want to throw a perfectly good bolt group away."
"If the frame isn't strong enough even with making it out of twelve gauge steel then we have so many other problems it's not even worth looking at building another!" Winged snapped, slamming his desk.
I sighed, sweeping my hair back. "Sorry. I'm just in a million places right now."
Winged glared at me, so I just turned myself back to the bench. Some quick sketching got me the gas piston mechanism and a simple gas block and tube arrangement laid out, then an attachment to the bolt carrier to interface with the piston. I'd probably tie the two together with a pin or rivet. Once that was done, I needed a surface to let the bolt run in. If I made it a rail on the receiver… then I'd need to have something to put the bolt carrier in. Hmm. Maybe if I put the bolt carrier in a piston interface that would ride on a pair of rails stamped into the receiver? If I did that, it would just be easier to build the entire piston and weld it to the piston interface and make it just one part with the bolt carrier.
Yeah, that would work. I'd have to make it an open bolt to get enough clearance to put the belt in, but this was a machine gun. Open bolt was practically a requirement, unless we wanted to hang this off the front of a prop plane. The issue was finding a way to do the belt advancer, though. If I advanced it on the backstroke, though… then I'd need to figure out which way to eject so the round coming in didn't interfere. I couldn't advance on the forestroke, though, since the round had to be in position on the forestroke so the round could get picked up out of the disintegrating link. Which reminded me…
"We're going for fully disintegrating, right?" I yelled at Winged, who'd started up the lathe for something.
"WHAT?!"
"DISINTEGRATING BELT YES?"
"YES SECTIONED BELT!"
"NO, FULLY DISINTEGRATING."
Shutting down the lathe, Winged came over. "I thought we were using twenty-five round sectioned belts."
"Yes, I thought we were using disintegrating belts of twenty five rounds." I said.
It took a solid minute of staring at each other before groaning.
"Morgue!" I yelled.
"WHAT?"
Since he obviously wasn't doing anything important, I went over to where we'd put down Strypgia's still. Since we were basically cooking off camp stoves, it hadn't been hard to move the kitchen to surround it. There I found Morgue cooking something that looked mildly kosher, with Shiro making bread nearby.
"So disintegrating belts or sectioned belts?" I asked casually, making sure to stay out of range of Shiro's glare. She'd been a baker, and food prep cleanliness was important to her and I was covered in shop crap. True love did not trump keeping my grease-covered mits out of her kitchen.
"Sectioned."
Looks like I'd been outvoted. A sectioned belt would be a bit more of a pain to make, since we'd need to pin everything together, but we could always reuse old ones. That also meant I'd need to design a belt link, though, and… balls. By the time I'd get done with all this, I wouldn't be able to keep making coats. The rainy season would be soon, and I didn't want to let anyone come down with hypothermia because we were all still rocking midweight summerwear and windbreakers. The longer we could keep Shiro and Medic from having to do first aid and medical care, the better.
///
I'd really thought I'd worked all the surprises out for the week, I really did. Spectral had started teaching basic swordplay and Stryp was working on firearms instruction. The food issue was mostly solved. Kyram had yet to go full office gremlin, and had even scrounged up a filthy old typewriter to keep notes on. I'd even prototyped out a one-pin metal belt design we could start making once the drop press got figured out, and Winged was working on the new rifles as we spoke. I'd even managed to slap together a mass production setup for the new rifle ammo, as soon as we started batch producing it.
"Tabac!" Tobias said, coming up to the sewing machine as I finished up another coat. "I have good news!"
Oh no.
"What is it, then?" I asked, finishing the seam and popping the clutch out. Yes, I put in a clutch for my sewing machine. Don't judge.
"I got a job at the Dust store!"
Turning around, I gaped at him. "Which one?"
"The Schnee one! Up in Yangzhen, by the river."
My eyes narrowed. We'd been slowly making an informal map of the city as compared to the formal maps, which were distinctly lacking in information that we needed. We were nominally in Huangsongyu, which was an old town that got absorbed, turned into manufacturing, and then abandoned.
"Yangzhen's nearly eight kilometers uphill of here, Tobias." I said carefully. "How did you get a job there?"
More importantly, Yangzhen was also a Nice Part of Town, which meant it was actively defended. In Mistral, that defense came in the form of staggering elevation and firebreak zones with walls behind them. Areas that weren't actively protected, like ours, were what we theorized as being a form of entangling and temporalizing ground: by pulling the civilians out, the Grimm could be lured into a confusing morass, which would then turn a charging horde into a steady trickle to move into a beaten zone and then get killed off with aimed rifle fire. Since we were in ablative territory, that meant the long arm of the law was about as long as Baka's. Our less than legal activities wouldn't draw any official reprise, as long as we didn't go too far from home or try to work inside the city limits. On the other hand, people from further up the hill would default to assuming we were at best an illegal immigrant, and at worst part of the Triads.
Tobias just laughed at me. ""Atlesian ist, aus irgendeinem Grund, nur Deutsch mit einem seltsamen Akzent! Die haben mich eingestellt ohne groß fragen zu stellen, ich glaube die dachten ich währe einer von Ihnen.""
I looked at him. "Pero no hablo alemania, Tobias. English, man English."
"So Atlas? They just speak German." he said, grinning. "Kinda weird German, but German. And I speak German!"
"Winged will be absolutely thrilled to hear this, I'm sure." I said calmly, before going back to my sewing. "Do you get an employee discount?"
"I pay cost for the first thousand lien of purchases a month, yeah." Tobias said, chuckling. "More importantly, I make five percent commission! With the amount of Dust your average Hunter buys, we'll be set in no time!"
"Then how much did you make today?" I grumbled, kicking the clutch back in and stopped rocking to brake the speed back down. When I got moving, my sewing table could go just as fast as my old Husquavarna- which was quite a bit faster than I could feed it!
"Oh, about four thousand Lien."
My hands froze up, and my feet stopped moving. As the belt squealed, I turned to look at Tobias. That was… a lot of money. A lot of money. My eyes were widening, and before I knew it I was on my feet and grinning.
"SPECTRAL! SHIRO! MARCUS!" I yelled. "SHOPPING RUN TIME!"
Three heads came out from around the side of the wall, grinning. "Food?" one of them asked, I couldn't tell which.
"Meat's back on the menu, boys!" I yelled, grinning. "Tobias has just volunteered to get our diets back on track, and-"
I was cut off as Tobias was dragged from the room like a war trophy, Spoder joining in the mass run to the Tairjet in the one working strip mall around here. Even in Remnant, there was big box retail. With that done, I sighed, and sat back down to start sewing. I had work to do.
////
It was on Wednesday that things went wrong. Specifically, I ran out of thread, and if I didn't want to pay horrible prices from our limited budget I'd need to wait until the flea market got called on Friday. As such, I had time to go work on the technical with Winged. Between the two of us, we'd knocked together a plan for a gun that was halfway between a Hotchkiss and a PK to serve as our machine gun. While Winged welded and milled out the bolt carrier, I got to work hand-forging the receiver. To do that, I needed to get our anvil, a square peg, and a good chunk of sheet steel that I could afford to get hot.
Once that was ready, I needed to get to work. The receiver was going to be basically a piece of c-channel with some cuts on it, so I started there. The next step was going to be flattening the guide rails on it, and then my time forging it was done. Just in case, though, I banged out three more. Once they were done cooling, I would get to work with the drill press and metal saw to cut the slots in them for the trigger group and a few other parts, but until then I was going to work on the other sheet steel components. It would take a day or two, but I was going to end up finishing a lot of the covers and lugs. The other thing I was going to be building were some of the rivet-on components, like the sight rails for a scope one day. Winged would probably finish up with his components tomorrow, and then I'd do assembly. Until then, I was on truck duty with Glitch.
A week into our ownership of the truck, and it looked totally different. We'd pulled the old bed, chopped off most of the bodywork, and been steadily replacing bits and pieces as we boosted abandoned cars and salvaged them for saleable parts. We'd put on a new bed and front end out of sheet metal, fresh doors that weren't rotted out on the bottom, and new headlights. My suggestion to just use wooden superstructure for that was roundly rejected, with Winged trying to brain me with a bottle of flux as I ran, laughing. Now I was working on bolting in the tripod we were going to be mounting the machine guns on.
The big thing that people thought of in our world when they heard "truck with a gun in it" was some idiot throwing a machine gun bipod on the roof of a truck and letting rip. This was dumb. What we were going to do was build actual tripods, albeit simple ones, bolt them into the truck bed for stable rests, and then put the machine guns in them. If I had the time and Winged had the inclination, we could even build proper pintle mounts at some point so we could tack some gun shields in there.
Of course, we still had to bolt the darn things in, which meant I had to bolt them in. Grumbling and swearing, I just got the eight mil tap and got to work. Two turns in, one turn back, for-fucking-ever. At least Space had already built the tripod. By the time I was done, it was dinnertime, which meant washing up. Getting to the sink outside the bathroom, I grumbled as I tried to scrub off the oil from the day. By the time I was done, everyone else had gathered around the mess hall table, where there were massive pots of stew and half a slab of roast beef. Banging on her glass from the head of the table, Spectral grinned.
"Alright, everyone!" Spectral said, smiling. "We've finally got a date for where we are!"
As I got a bowl of chilli, everyone settled down. "So, we figured out based on the fact it's three weeks to when Haven takes in it's new class and when the last Vytal festival was and when it's next scheduled, we're about two weeks before the start of RWBY volume one. We have nine months, approximately, until the Fall of Beacon."
The table broke into conversation for a minute, before Spectral banged on her glass. "Hey! Hold on! We've got time, calm down!"
Standing up, I started to speak. "We still need to figure out what to do, and when to show our hand. We're getting prepared, and with recent discoveries it's coming along quite well, but we still need to plan carefully. The curtain only goes up once- and when it does, we need to be ready to change the world."
Spectral Waltz
Scatterbrained Writer
- Location
- Walking the Endless Corridors
Fun times ahead~
FC Error
Missileer
- Location
- Aware of where I am not
90% sure that was where that plot point originated
Spectre
eternal servant to the Fire/EMS gods
- Location
- NY
"Hey Medic." Looking up from our stock of liberated medical supplies that I was going over for the hundredth time this week, I saw Strypgia leaning on what passed for the doorway to my little medicine room. "You busy?"
My ears perked up at the tone of his voice. Stryp was bored, a sentiment I could understand all too well. The only reason I was doing inventory on our supplies was because several of the medicines in it were things that I didn't want any besides myself and Shiro touching. We had enough problems right now without someone getting hooked on Oxy or making a meth lab using cough syrup and allergy medication. "Not particularly. You're bored aren't you?"
Stryp shook his head yes, an ear to ear grin on his face. "You up for exploring the warehouses around us… I think most of them are locked." I'm pretty sure my face was a good match for Stryps. I'm also positive Tabac had a chill run down his spine over the disturbance in the force he had just felt. Stryp was the bored soldier, and I was a bored firefighter. The only difference between the two is the level of destruction we could reach, and that was only because the soldier had access to explosives.
A chance to flex my old skills… not to mention pay back Tabac and Winged for every time they had set off my NBCER senses with their projects… how could I resist.
"I'm in."
Slinging my shotgun over my shoulder and grabbing the axe and Halligan Bar I'd liberated from a local fire station, I followed him out the back to the warehouse right next to ours.
Truth be told I was a bit disappointed upon seeing the first door, a simple uninspired wood door set in a wood frame with only a deadbolt and mortise lock in the doorknob keeping it together. All together it was rather pitiful. Back home, your average mom and pop grocery store had better security than this. "Okay give me ten seconds to remove the faceplate and pull the cylinder from the deadbolt, and another five to pop the mortise lock out of the door jam."
"I got something better." Stryp cheerfully replied, picking my five foot two frame up and moving me a couple feet away from the door.
"Define bet-"
BANG!...BANG!
I instinctively cringed as Stryp aimed his shotgun at the door and gave it both barrels, frowning as he pushes the shattered remains of the door open. Damn grunts and their lack of appreciation for the fine art of forcible entry techniques. "That's cheating…" I pouted.
Stryp shrugged. "It's effective."
"No ability to control the door, no idea what the hell was behind object you were throwing hot lead at…" I grumbled under my breath, going in behind him, still pissed off at him for stealing all the fun. "Lucky it wasn't full of dust or I'd be really pissed at you wherever the explosion sent us next, unless it was Genlock.
Stryp stared
"What? I like giant robots."
"How do you know we'd end up there?"
"Well several thousand gallons of Liquid Natural Gas sent us here. And Genlock has more in common with RWBY then the real world does."
"Fair enough." Stryp shrugged before shouldering his shotgun. "Looks like it's empty."
"We sure these warehouses didn't travel with us from Detroit?" I jokingly asked. Not that I had any room to talk, Buffalo had so many abandoned warehouses that we could have been a stand in for a Power Rangers hometown. "Shall we try the next one?"
"Sure, let's go see what's behind door number two."
This time I made sure to cut off Stryp before he could get anywhere near the next warehouse door, Halligan already in hand. "Just let me have my fun for once." As it turns out, I was over estimating the strength of the doors. I get a good bite into the seam between it and the deadbolts faceplate with ads of my halligan… and the ensuing tug takes the entire deadbolt out along with a good portion of the top right corner of the door. Grumbling about piss poor building code standards, I reached through the opening and opened the door. "After you." I said to Stryp, ignoring the grin on his face.
"Well at least it's not empty this time." Poking my head in after him, I saw the place stocked wall-to-wall with bags of something. I took a deep breath, and immediately coughed up my lungs from all the dust- no I knew the taste of this stuff. "Concrete." I said after I got done hacking. "So what are we going to do with it?"
"I've got some ideas, but we'll wait for Tabac to decide." Stryp replied with a shrug. "Would it have killed this universe to give us something good for once?"
The answer to that seemed to be yes as we made our way through the four remaining warehouses, which held a combined total of a bunch of scrap metal and absolutely nothing else of value with the exception of the sixth one that might have been a garage and had a can of spray paint in it that we had put to good use. Well at least we hadn't walked into a pile of something that was some combination of poisonous, explosive, or radioactive. Thank god for small miracles.
"Well at least we now have space to store all the shit those idiots are making." I muttered before turning back to Stryp. "You want to go tell Tabac what we found while I finish cleaning up?"
"Sure." Stryp nodded, a small smirk on his face. "I'm kind of surprised he didn't already come out here with all the shooting we were doing."
I returned the smile. "Maybe all the screaming matches between him and the rest of us over his plans finally made him deaf."
My ears perked up at the tone of his voice. Stryp was bored, a sentiment I could understand all too well. The only reason I was doing inventory on our supplies was because several of the medicines in it were things that I didn't want any besides myself and Shiro touching. We had enough problems right now without someone getting hooked on Oxy or making a meth lab using cough syrup and allergy medication. "Not particularly. You're bored aren't you?"
Stryp shook his head yes, an ear to ear grin on his face. "You up for exploring the warehouses around us… I think most of them are locked." I'm pretty sure my face was a good match for Stryps. I'm also positive Tabac had a chill run down his spine over the disturbance in the force he had just felt. Stryp was the bored soldier, and I was a bored firefighter. The only difference between the two is the level of destruction we could reach, and that was only because the soldier had access to explosives.
A chance to flex my old skills… not to mention pay back Tabac and Winged for every time they had set off my NBCER senses with their projects… how could I resist.
"I'm in."
Slinging my shotgun over my shoulder and grabbing the axe and Halligan Bar I'd liberated from a local fire station, I followed him out the back to the warehouse right next to ours.
Truth be told I was a bit disappointed upon seeing the first door, a simple uninspired wood door set in a wood frame with only a deadbolt and mortise lock in the doorknob keeping it together. All together it was rather pitiful. Back home, your average mom and pop grocery store had better security than this. "Okay give me ten seconds to remove the faceplate and pull the cylinder from the deadbolt, and another five to pop the mortise lock out of the door jam."
"I got something better." Stryp cheerfully replied, picking my five foot two frame up and moving me a couple feet away from the door.
"Define bet-"
BANG!...BANG!
I instinctively cringed as Stryp aimed his shotgun at the door and gave it both barrels, frowning as he pushes the shattered remains of the door open. Damn grunts and their lack of appreciation for the fine art of forcible entry techniques. "That's cheating…" I pouted.
Stryp shrugged. "It's effective."
"No ability to control the door, no idea what the hell was behind object you were throwing hot lead at…" I grumbled under my breath, going in behind him, still pissed off at him for stealing all the fun. "Lucky it wasn't full of dust or I'd be really pissed at you wherever the explosion sent us next, unless it was Genlock.
Stryp stared
"What? I like giant robots."
"How do you know we'd end up there?"
"Well several thousand gallons of Liquid Natural Gas sent us here. And Genlock has more in common with RWBY then the real world does."
"Fair enough." Stryp shrugged before shouldering his shotgun. "Looks like it's empty."
"We sure these warehouses didn't travel with us from Detroit?" I jokingly asked. Not that I had any room to talk, Buffalo had so many abandoned warehouses that we could have been a stand in for a Power Rangers hometown. "Shall we try the next one?"
"Sure, let's go see what's behind door number two."
This time I made sure to cut off Stryp before he could get anywhere near the next warehouse door, Halligan already in hand. "Just let me have my fun for once." As it turns out, I was over estimating the strength of the doors. I get a good bite into the seam between it and the deadbolts faceplate with ads of my halligan… and the ensuing tug takes the entire deadbolt out along with a good portion of the top right corner of the door. Grumbling about piss poor building code standards, I reached through the opening and opened the door. "After you." I said to Stryp, ignoring the grin on his face.
"Well at least it's not empty this time." Poking my head in after him, I saw the place stocked wall-to-wall with bags of something. I took a deep breath, and immediately coughed up my lungs from all the dust- no I knew the taste of this stuff. "Concrete." I said after I got done hacking. "So what are we going to do with it?"
"I've got some ideas, but we'll wait for Tabac to decide." Stryp replied with a shrug. "Would it have killed this universe to give us something good for once?"
The answer to that seemed to be yes as we made our way through the four remaining warehouses, which held a combined total of a bunch of scrap metal and absolutely nothing else of value with the exception of the sixth one that might have been a garage and had a can of spray paint in it that we had put to good use. Well at least we hadn't walked into a pile of something that was some combination of poisonous, explosive, or radioactive. Thank god for small miracles.
"Well at least we now have space to store all the shit those idiots are making." I muttered before turning back to Stryp. "You want to go tell Tabac what we found while I finish cleaning up?"
"Sure." Stryp nodded, a small smirk on his face. "I'm kind of surprised he didn't already come out here with all the shooting we were doing."
I returned the smile. "Maybe all the screaming matches between him and the rest of us over his plans finally made him deaf."
- Location
- National Capital Region, USA
I have a plan, and it is 'a shitload of guns', since I'm gonna need them to shoot every modderpocker between me and getting home. And Jaune, since pock that idiot.
She is one of only two people who know the ending I have in mind, so she could land things if needed. OTOH, if I have to choke Salem until she coughs up a portal spell, I'm down for it.
Hey, how about a story bit? We needed a truck, right? Here's how we got it:
+++
Joe looked back over his shoulder at the older man before returning to his lookout scan at the mouth of the alley. "They teach you this in the Army?"
"Nope," the bearded man replied, pulling the slim metal rod from his backpack and slipping it into the rubber seal at the bottom of the window in the driver's side door on the flatbed truck. "But I have wandered to and fro in the world for many years, and you pick up a lot of things. Also, you meet more than a couple guys who are in the Army because a judge gave them a choice of that or prison. Very educational." He carefully positioned the metal strip next to the truck's old-fashioned lift lock, worked it right for a second, then lifted it up.
The lock tab popped up, and Strype smiled. He removed the rod, and opened the now unlocked truck. "Keep an eye out. The door was the easy part. It's damn convenient for all the flying warships and mecha in this world, the trucks still look like 1960s Fords." He ducked his head inside and under the steering column.
Eragon looked back at them from the far end of the alley. He waved his hands and shrugged at them, asking how long this would take. Joe shrugged right back at him. Like he knew about boosting trucks?
It turned out to be less than two minutes with a series of clunks, and some cursing in English, Latin, and Japanese before the truck cranked slowly and then sputtered to life.
Strype pulled his head out from under the steering wheel and sat down in the driver's seat. He closed the door, rolled down the window, and stuck his head out the door. "All aboard! This show is hitting the road!"
Both lookouts were in the truck in record time. Grand theft auto was a great way to start life in Remnant, and none of them wanted to meet the local cops that way.
+++
Fortunately, none of the other cars on the road seemed to really notice anything about them. They pulled up to a red stoplight at an intersection a few miles from the quiet alley where they'd first spotted the unattended truck they'd decided to 'requisition'. The neighborhood they'd hit now was a bit more upscale than the industrial one they'd come from, or the warehouse one they were heading back to, but not much. Some shops and restaurants, one or two that seemed to be catering to Hunters.
Strype looked left for any traffic, then right. He grunted. "Huh. That's funny."
Eragon, who'd gotten the passenger door seat by squishing Joe to the middle of the bench, looked at him, then turned his head to see what Strype was looking at. "What is it?"
"Guy sitting alone in a truck with the engine running."
"So?"
"Outside a Dust shop? They don't exactly sell take-out. He's also pretty fixed on staring at what's happening in the shop. He hasn't even noticed us pull up near him."
Joe craned his head to see past Eragon. "So what's happening in the store?"
"Three guys in dark clothes... pointing something in their hands at a guy behind the counter, who has his hands in the air. Robbery." Strype sighed and opened the driver's side door. "Eragon, take over driving."
Joe snapped his head around to goggle at Strype. "Wait, what are you doing?!"
"Getting us another truck."
Strype took his Tabac-built shotgun with him, walking around the back of their still-running truck as Eragon scooted over into the driver's seat. "Joe, what the Hell is he doing? Is he crazy?"
"Possibly. Too much Army on the brain."
Eragon swore slowly as the obvious plan came together.
Strype slowly walked up the left side of the truck until he was just behind the driver. He raised his shotgun, butt-first, and took a stance like he was about to swing for a home run. He leaned forward a little to put his head even with the driver. "HEY, STUPID!"
The driver jumped at the sudden shout and whipped his head away from staring at his buddies inside. "Huh?!" He turned just in time to get Strype's shotgun butt right between his eyes.
Joe and Eragon winced in stereo. "That looked like it hurt." Eragon muttered, looking out at the carnage.
"Good thing he was already ugly?"
The driver fell over bonelessly as Strype opened the door and got in, shoving the unconscious man over. He quickly pulled a pistol off the man's belt and bound the man's hands behind him with his own belt. A strip of torn-off shirt as a blindfold, and Strype shoved the thug into the other footwell. He swung the driver's door shut and waved at the other two. "Alright. Let's get gone before his pals notice we just jacked their getaway car." He put the truck into gear and pulled out in front of them. "Follow me!"
Joe mechanically put the first truck into gear and set off after him. He threw a nervous look inside at the still-being-robbed Dust shop. "Have... have they even noticed?"
Eragon took a look himself. "No, but keep driving. I don't want to be here when they come out either."
+++
"Hey, Tabac! We're back!" Strype announced, walking in with his shotgun slung low-ready. "Found us a couple trucks."
Tabac raised his head from the workbench where he'd been bent over putting together another weapon. "A couple? What happened to one?"
"Took advantage of an opportunity. By the way, here's an example of a local pistol if we want to try copying one." Strype put a weirdly techy automatic down on the table. "Plus a wallet with some local cash and stuff."
Tabac gave the old soldier a funny look. "Strype..." he said slowly. "What did you do?"
"Tabac, you said he was the mature and responsible one!" Joe complained, coming in behind him. "He decided to steal the getaway car off a gang robbing a Dust store!"
Strype hung his shotgun and ammo pouch up on one of the racks in their improvised armory. "It was just a little robbery! Total amateur hour. Biggest risk was I'd fall down laughing and hurt myself."
Tabac looked at Joe, then back at Strype. "....what."
"Driver was totally distracted watching his buddies rob the store. He didn't even notice I was there until I announced myself." Strype shrugged. "I figured he and his friends are either too busy getting arrested trying to walk home with a bunch of stolen Dust, or not very likely to report their car was stolen in the middle of a robbery."
"What happened to the driver?" Tabac asked, trying to make sense of this latest madness.
"Took his wallet, pistol, and Scroll. Left him tied up in a trash can in an alley beside a Hunters' bar. Figure they'll know what to do with him," Strype said cheerfully. "Eragon's parking both trucks out back. When's dinner?"
"At least we've got two trucks now?" Joe joked weakly.
"Why am I running a circus?" Tabac said tiredly.