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Thaluikhain:"Goddamnit," says your reluctant ally. "Fine, let's find a good place to ambush them then."
You and your companions fall back down the corridor, keeping low to stay out of sight, and squeezing into an alcove just as the remaining enemies come into view, calling for their squadmate, whose name is apparently 'Steve.'
Upon seeing Steve's body, they become very upset, one swearing, another rushing to the side of the body, and another seemingly trying to aim in all directions with his weapon. Their distraction makes a fine opportunity to either complete your escape or attack them by surprise.
Darth Rabbitt:You and your crew scramble away from the entrance and just manage to throw yourselves into a ditch before the Sisters would get eyes on you. You hear them freaking out over their bar's deadmeat, and a quick peek shows that between gawking and weeping, they don't have eyes to spare for you. It's a prime chance for whacking or else backing (away). Slice gestures eagerly with his BoomBoom™.
"Let's find a better ambush point," says one of your allies, and you all creep away from the approaching guards, and crouch down behind a fallen alien statue.
The guards come into view, still bursting static at each other from behind their facemasks. When they see the body, they rush over to examine it, one going so far as to shake it, as if hoping it was merely sleeping. If you wanted to hurl your charge, or even finish sneaking away, now's the time.
One of your allies' throws sends their grenade too far, the blast only throwing the enemies forward. They begin to fire wildly in your general direction, their weapons' beams leaving glowing points of heated metal where they strike. A second grenade catches a beam before it reaches them, but that explosion leaves them stunned, and you manage to place your own device among them while they drift in confusion. You duck back behind cover before it, and yet the whole corridor seems to quake from the blast, which rattles your head against a bulkhead.
When you raise your head over the lip of the ditch, those Sisters still vaping are all feebly groaning heaps, meat for the vats. Still, your team isn't pain-free. Jackoboy caught a dud dart to the chest, and is curled up like he took a punch from a V-baller. Slice seems fine, though.
One by one, you all throw the BoomBooms™, but as yours leaves your hand, you get a hard shove in the chest and have to sit down and figure out how to breathe. It takes a while, and you realize that you took a wild shot from one of the Sisters. You pry the missile out of your jacket - it's an explosive bullet, but it didn't go off, so it was just a big slow thing (for a bullet) that punched you. You'll have a murderous bruise.
Still, from the sound of it, the Sisters are done. You should have a free hand in the area, for a while at least.
The charges do their work, hurling men against stone, and shattering stone into deadly showers of shrapnel. The guards get off a few wild shots, and one of those sweeps across one of your allies, but the beam is half-scattered by a cloud of stone dust, and they do not seem too badly off. The guards, on the other hand, are all left dead or incapacitated. Faint groans are all they seem to be able to manage.
In your victory, you feel a sense of profound relief, as though a weight you had carried for far too long has been lifted from you.
Yes, although Sweet Pea's most recent speech is out of character for him. And seriously, feel free to respond to him out of the usual sequence.Thaluikhain wrote:So SlyJohnny is Sweet Pea, but I don't know that?
Cups challenge to remember the thing.The BoomBooms™ have left very little to salvage. The Sisters' weapons are shattered, and their clothes shredded. Your victims are still alive, but bleeding badly from their wounds, unable to do more than twitch.
"P, did you just take one of everything this morning?" asks Slice.
The inside of the control room pumping station is a mess, with half-melted pipes leaking everywhere, making the sound of an entire primary school urinating at once. Still, absent the threat of death, something about the place tugs at your thoughts, like a forgotten chore or misremembered safety procedure.
If you follow your friend, you can make a Cups check to remember a thing. If you'd prefer to dredge the slurry for spoils or perform some other activity in the corridor, that's fine too.The demolition charges have left very little to salvage. Even the stone of the passage is cracked, and what's left of your enemies resembles an unfortunate meat sauce smeared down the corridor. One of your fellows strides through the mess, leaving red footprints, making for the far end of the corridor and whatever lies beyond.
Darth Rabbitt:As you wander through the station, it comes to each of you, one by one; you know how to work the controls of this equipment. Jackoboy learned how to maneuver the Clean Cobra™ inpipe drones from a vocational program in juvie. Sweet Pea's mastery of elaborate novelty bongs has given him a good grasp of hydraulic mapping. Slice has been doing under-the-table plumbing for years, and can wrench what must be wrenched. You could shut down this station legit, then jack it expert-style, so it couldn't be unjacked.
Or you could, if half the stuff wasn't in total harsh realm.
"Hold up," says Slice. He's found a working terminal. "Can't do much from here, right? Not enough keys left. But there are keys close by. This place is set to take orders from an intake block. We can do it all from there. Trouble is, the block's outside. Outside outside. Still, any outlock will have emergency rad-gear, sure."
The corridor leads you into a room very like the one you fled from earlier, the same glyphs, the same huge inhuman statues. But in this room, there is the sense of a guiding presence. You and each of your companions is drawn to a particular set of symbols, which glow softly at your approach, and you intuit that you can manipulate the symbols to do... something. It's almost as if you were being fed the knowledge telepathically.
Each of you works at your glyph set, and a new hidden passage opens. You know without comprehending that all the answers you've been seeking can be found at the end of it, if you have the courage.
Thaluikhain:Your bars meet your words with awkward stony silence. There is no locker or locker-like compartment to be seen. You approach Slice's terminal as he leaves it, heading for the door with purpose in his stride. Jackoboy is stuffing odds and ends into his pockets.
The terminal displays a schematic of the local waterworks, covered in technical notations. It confirms Slice's statements: this station can be controlled from another location, one that is outside the city, in a radiation zone. Everything outside the city seems to be marked as a radiation zone.
Darth Rabbitt:Pipes there are, and you put one in your pocket. Not as sweet as your longarm that shoots rockets, but quieter and handier in close quarters. A quick sweep turns up some auxiliary tools as well, cheap little things the length of your finger and half as thick, only good in a pinch.
Sweet Pea heads over to Slice's terminal. Slice heads for the door.
Examining the ruined stations, there are a few circuit-boards that look salvageable if you wanted to pry them out. Probably fetch a decent price at the pawn.
You enter the passage and proceed cautiously forward, leaving bootprints in the deep dust. Your companions seem reluctant to follow. "Can we trust what we think we know?" asks one. "I've had so many different thoughts, and I don't know why we keep being attacked." The other is searching the chamber you've left, running his hands over the glyphs, pulling loose small objects here and there.
Ahead, the passage stretches onward, cluttered with stony debris.
Pseudo Stupidity wrote:This Applebees fucking sucks, much like all Applebees. I wanted to go to Femboy Hooters (communism).
Darth Rabbitt:You take inventory. Besides some personal effects (including phones with no reception on this level), Jackoboy is carrying his pipe-club, a hypo of Liquid Courage™, a single BoomBoom™ and some sort of off-brand hardcore gyrojet rifle; and he's acquiring a few scavenged circuit boards. Sweet Pea has a similar hypo, grenade, and rifle, as well as a Switchblade™, a zipgun, a printed map, and some sort of datachip with official-looking markings.
Sweet Pea catches up with a muttering Slice, offering a view of the map. Jackoboy finishes his collecting, then follows.
One of your companions jogs up to you. "Show me where we're going," he says, proffering a plaque of orange metal marked with a strange elaborate diagram. A moment of recognition, and you can see that the diagram is a map of the ruins. Your destination is plainly visible (at least to you), although the passage ahead has many turns and dead-end off-shoots.
