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Post by JesterJoker on Jun 12, 2007 23:39:57 GMT -5
Or something. You up for the Vespasian and Illunova RP, Traveler? I think starting it as a PBP, and playing it on a chat if we want to do that afterward, would work. We can set the first stage directions and such on here.
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Post by JesterJoker on Jun 18, 2007 1:57:53 GMT -5
The corpses crawled high into the sky. Blood dribbled down them like lava and mingled with the rain rushing across the surface of the planet. The foliage, as little as it was, resembled algae, but the blood and the rain swirled into a grotesque mass.
Vespasian Shiraan stood upon them, pistol in one hand, photon sword in the other, and looked at the swarm of monsters about to overtake his position on the high ground. The sword sputtered, its energy almost done, and the pistol had one more barrage within its chamber.
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Jun 18, 2007 2:13:49 GMT -5
The odors of fresh blood and old death mingled in the cloying mud. Nothing on the planet's surface remained untouched by the squelching mass, various shades of glistening browns from horizon to horizon. Illunova had never seen anything or smelled anything so revolting, and she had immersed herself as completely as possible into the mess.
Before her, a mass of strange flesh writhed and screamed. They were advancing with unnerving speed and a weird grace toward the single point of color on the field of mud. From her position, Illunova could not discern anything more about the figure except that it was another person, very different from that gruesome army. As the regiment barreled toward the lone gunman, she flicked a switch on a device strapped to her belt. Particles of dirt and other things she did not ponder gritted between her fingers and the metal, but it clicked reassuringly.
In a few moments, a good number of the soldiers were going to take flight and fast. That much was certain. Whether the gunman would survive remained to be seen.
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Post by JesterJoker on Jun 18, 2007 15:01:29 GMT -5
Everything diminished to a black and white clarity of life or death. If Vespasian knew Nova was there, he couldn't have reacted to it. Wet and dripping horrors, like a concoction of algae and fish, surged toward him across the swamp like a wave.
Vespasian holstered his weapons and scrambled up the mountain of corpses. The monsters quickened their pace, spurred by his retreat. Their gold eyes at once sparkled and looked soulless, driven to one thing only.
He could that against them, until the ground gave way or their masters gave them greater intelligence. The position on the mountain had been shaky at best, with the blood slippery under his feet, and therein lied his plan.
As he climbed, Vespasian kicked at the blood and the corpses. The ground shook and created an avalanche. The monsters fell back before it and toppled one after another. Vespasian, to his dismay, found himself dragged along with the mountain into the waiting wave of horror.
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Jun 18, 2007 21:53:18 GMT -5
The eldritch tide rushed onward, toward the lone gunman. An eerie phosphoresce provided the only source of illumination, casting a sickly yellowish light over the demonic scene in front of her. Whether the light emanated from a distant star or strange bioluminescent beings that populated the bloody soup, she could not say. Around the gunman a hazy halo had formed, a dull orange glimmer that seemed attracted to his vitality. Murky grey clouds clung to the monsters, glinting occasionally with a flash of dead gold eyes.
Illunova watched with quiet satisfaction as the cloud rumbled toward the gunman's glimmer until she noticed with growing dismay that the ground under the horde's pounding feet was becoming increasingly unsteady, losing cohesion before her eyes. An avalanche was forming, slowly at first and then gathering mass and speed as the corpses tumbled together, falling ever more quickly down the bloody slope.
The mudslide was headed directly toward her. Entrenched as she was in the mire, Illunova considered the possibility that the army would roll atop her harmlessly. But more likely, she would be shoved farther down into revolting muck, finally to suffocate among those deathly fumes. With a grunt of effort, she pulled herself out of the mud with an audible pop and scrambled as far away from the falling mountain as possible. Her one comfort was that if any zombies survived the avalanche, there was little chance that they would sniff her out, coated as she was in the world's omnipresent slime.
The gunman might prove another matter altogether. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he was the only other living being Illunova had seen on the planet. Her firewand was clogged at the moment, but a few minutes would have it restored to working order. For now, she kept her hand hovering over the handle of her monolash. In the midst of the clouds and mud flung in all directions, that orange glimmer sparkled and glowed, marking the gunman's erratic path.
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Post by JesterJoker on Jun 19, 2007 23:45:27 GMT -5
Vespasian tried to reclaim his feet, but the blood and corpses and aliens dragged him further into the muck. He got his head above it once or twice. The terrible liquids poured into his mouth and nostrils and tasted of flesh.
He gagged and almost wished he could retreat. His preservation instincts were too strong and he kept fighting between the precarious position of life and despair. Once, he lifted his head above the monsters and saw a woman scramble away.
Vespasian yelled to her, saying something about help, and then felt a ring squish against his chest. It seemed to expand, like it would engulf if he would allow it. His soul leapt at the thought of an actual enemy.
He braced his elbows against the ring and struggled. It opened, and abruptly, he could think again. He grabbed a monster's head and elbow, as silppery as they felt, as a handhold and stood above them for a minute.
The woman fled from the avalanche, but he could see a metallic shape forty or fifty feet from her, half hidden within the monsters. It shined underneath the vague light of the planet, distinctive against the organic mass. He called to her and pointed forward; she could reach it. The monsters grabbed at his feet but he climbed forward, always in motion.
Was the metallic shape the Illustrious? Or the woman's spaceship? He didn't know, but it could rescue them.
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Jun 26, 2007 16:52:20 GMT -5
For a moment, Illunova's annoyance at the utter repugnance of the planet disappeared as she realized that the gunman had noticed her. Not a single corpse of the mindless horde had done as much as caught her eye, but he actually gestured and called to her. Then her foot slipped in a particularly slushy tract of mud, and she sunk down past her thigh. Her stomach clenched hard at the sudden draught of diseased rot that rushed up toward her, the noxious exhalations of recently dead bodies.
Only strict self-control practiced from childhood allowed her to retain the contents of her stomach while she floundered in the muck and slowly pulled herself out. Her eyes and ears observed in all directions as she regained her feet, and she saw what the man had seen earlier and had indicated. That he had pointed it out to her raised some interesting questions about his intentions regarding her, but she would not snub this possible escape without very good reason.
As she neared the expanse of unearthed metal with dimensions that could indicate vessel, she became certain both that it was of a design unknown to her, and that the dead horde had no interest in it. She made her way slowly but steadily, immersed up to her waist in the noisome stew and moving as if through thick, wet sand. Finally, breathing hard, she felt her booted feet clunk on the metallic hull of the ship, if a ship it was.
Unless he showed himself to be extremely hostile toward her, Illunova decided that she would not immediately shoot him if he survived the journey over here. On the other hand, she would not risk attracting the attention and ire of the corpse throng by aiding him until he reached her, if he did.
She would have liked to take apart her firewand and begin cleaning it, but there was always the possibility that the gunman would not live to aid her escape or want to. Instead of attending to her primary weapon, Illunova began traversing the exposed sheet of metal, searching for any markings indicating an opening. Keeping one eye and both ears alert, she noticed as she searched that the gunman was struggling in her direction, pursued as always by the monstrous creatures but obviously determined to stay alive.
Her hand gripped her monolash, ever ready to activate the deadly thin whip with press of her thumb and a flick of the wrist.
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Post by JesterJoker on Jun 30, 2007 1:11:01 GMT -5
As Vespasian figured it, at least one of them could escape the planet alive. Either that, or the woman could at least try to get into the thing before he arrived. The throng didn't exactly give them a lot of time for thinking.
The throng in question thrashed at Vespasian's feet as he climbed above their heads and a variety of the other appendages that didn't seem to be where they normally would be located.
Initially, he was hoping the Illustrious would arrive, but as that didn't seem to getting very far, he grabbed one of the heads, yanked it apart from the others and peeked at the woman through a hole of ragged pieces of squamous flesh.
He could sense himself getting a little crazy from the pressure and said, faster than he should have, 'Got the ship working yet? Figuring how it's working yet?"
He thrust his head back toward the mass of creature flesh and realised it was still rushing toward him. "Hurry hurry."
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Jul 3, 2007 22:33:57 GMT -5
Illunova worked as quickly as she could, combing her way over the ship's exposed hull with calm, precise efficiency. The shape and material of the hull was nothing like the knitted ship which had brought her here, one of the odd vestiges of high technology left to her people. It was hard under her boots and a sort of mottled bronze through the wave of squelching mud that washed over it. Sometimes, when an ambitious corpse reached up to grapple with the smooth surface and tumbled back to the deathly swarm, the domed ship rang dully.
It took much of Illunova's concentration to maintain her balance on the slippery, convex surface. She barely managed to keep her footing and realized after several very still minutes that the ship was heaving, slowly but steadily like a raft bobbing in a calm sea. If it became much worse, she would have to fall to her hands and knees or slip from the hull into the noisome filth.
Just as the ship was rising on a wave of mud or corpse, she heard the gunman speak. He was much closer now, pursued by the tenacious throng ever at his heels. Had she found out how to work it yet? How amusing this man was.
"I've not yet found a way inside," she replied, shouting as loud a she could without disrupting her focus. She ignored his admonition that she hurry. As soon as she spoke, she spotted a hair-thin crack running the length of the exposed piece of hull. The ship dipped again and she lowered herself to inspect the crack. Mud and grime were caked under her fingernails, but she scrabbled nonetheless with the fracture and felt a plate give slightly when she tugged.
He was closer when she looked up again, but she was concerned to see the noisome advance of the corpses. She charged the monolash and flicked a long, serpentine S over the joint in the plating so she could find again, then shambled as quickly as she safely could over the slick, heaving surface toward the gunman. With one hand she reached out to pull him on the ship's hull as soon as she could grasp his fingers, and with the other she began slicing cleanly through the horde with the monolash, leaving distorted and monstrous body parts strewn in the mud.
"Over there!" she called, "you may be able to open it. I'll hold these creatures off."
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Post by JesterJoker on Jul 11, 2007 0:39:11 GMT -5
Vespasian grabbed Illunova's hand and it, what, probably felt cool? It was certainly wonderful after the army of squamous grotesqueries. He jumped onto an edge of the ship's hull and stared across at what he had escaped.
His attention got distracted by Nova's potent whip, and from there, his reverie turned to the hull. He bent down to examine the hull and pried at the panel which Nova had signaled with the brand from the whip.
It acted as stubborn as it had been for Nova. As the sounds and moans continued from behind him, Vespasian drew his photon sword from his belt, switched it on and seared the hull with it. A blast of air issued from the hole and caught his face.
He brushed at his face and felt it heat up. He glanced at Nova, down into the open hull and, when the hull didn't seem to close immediately or cover his face with a poison or anything, he plunged a hand into it.
It felt hot, similar to the deserts of Rechatu. Vespasian considered the unknown, and the millions of them that could murder them, or the known, the things which surely would murder them were they to stay on this world.
"I got it open," Vespasian said. "You coming?"
He went in, and it was a hell of a way down.
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Jul 16, 2007 16:13:38 GMT -5
Under almost any other set of circumstances, Illunova would have snatched her hand back, and she couldn't help wincing just a little now at the sudden contact. Unexpected as it was, she reminded herself that the gunman's hand was to be preferred to the dumbly grasping claws of the corpses closing in on them.
She cast an eye back at the man to make sure he found the spot and then returned her full concentration to the task of keeping them both alive long enough to see if this ship could help them escape. The eldritch creatures could not gain a stable foothold on the hull, but their sheer overwhelming numbers allowed them to walk over their fallen comrades and too quickly they were swarming over the ship. She whirled smoothly from one side to another, bringing the monolash down on any corpses who approached too closely and severing them into pieces that twitched when they fell.
Nova heard a charge and then a noise like shearing metal and spared a glance to see the man buffeted by wind expelled from the ship. He called her, and after repelling a particularly fierce zombie, she turned around to see his head disappear into a dark void. She did not dare run across the ship, splattered with that nauseating stew as it was, but she carefully picked her way toward the hole and, after a few moments to hope he was out of her way, she let herself fall feet first into the darkness.
It was hot in there but dry, and the arid drafts felt better than a shower on Nova's filthy skin. The air smelled different, too, flat and sterile as boiled water. During the confusing rush of falling, she managed to switch the monolash to its ready mode, shining faintly in the suffocating dark. After an unsettlingly long time, she fell, knees safely bent, with a hard thump and immediately sprang to her feet, only to back into something - probably someone - who cursed.
She activated the monolash again, mostly for the light it provided. Sure enough, the gunman stood in the flickering glow.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked, "or where we are?" She tried to squint around the ship, but all she could see was the light from her monolash. She looked at the man again. "And do you have a light?"
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Post by JesterJoker on Jul 20, 2007 2:10:38 GMT -5
Sharp objects tripped Vespasian up and the confusion, between the horrors on the surface and the darkness within, began to make him a little manic. Broodingly so, for now, but he could sense the madness crawling on his mind. Sweat dripped into his eyes and a woman rammed into his back.
The motion jostled the flashlight from his grip and he groped on the smooth floor for it. It felt vaguely odd to stand at the woman's feet, for dozens of reasons. Again he felt the sharp objects, and this time they sliced his fingers slightly, but he grabbed the flashlight and stood up again.
"Okay, now I have a light," Vespasian said, and flicked the switch on.
They stood on the balcony of a starship's bridge. Shards of glass sprinkled the floor, as though it had been a mirror surface. Vespasian's and Nova's reflections peered up at them. Vespasian looked average, but for his long legs, perhaps large hands and feet and the sweat dripping from his purple hair and smooth face.
Chairs, monitors and screens loomed on the floor beneath them, but stood four times their height. Vespasian shined the flashlight around, and, from what he could tell, it was certainly built for something other than humans.
"It's probably built for the monsters," Vespasian muttered.
Nova's whip created a streak to his right, and he eyed it. "If it uses crystals, I could use some of the juice. And no, I don't know where we are. I've never been here before."
The monsters growled from above them and Vespasian climbed down into the main bridge. He grinned up at Nova,. "What do you say we retreat?"
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Jul 23, 2007 22:56:04 GMT -5
Nova heard something crunch under her boots, and after she blinked away the dazzle of the gunman's flashlight, she understood. Strange broken reflection stared up at her from the glass shards, dark and enigmatic. She ignored the glinting splinters and surveyed the room before them, a fairly typical starship command center on an inhumanly large scale.
The man was eyeing the place with the same surprise and critical assessment as she was, and he confirmed what she suspected when he professed his ignorance of the ship. She knew the look of a person sizing up an unknown, potentially dangerous but potentially useful object.
She was surprised that he knew the source of her monolash's power. She had not thought the technology was so widely known. "Yes, it is. They're powered by hyper-concentrated stellar energy." She supposed someone with the proper tools could harvest the crystalline chips, a maneuver she'd never yet been desperate enough to try.
At his next question, she nodded a little stiffly. "I agree. I will attend to the controls while you restore the power." Although she had only ever served on human starships, she had studied the many different designs used since humanity had first ventured into space. She thought she could work out the basic functions of the controls with a little time.
She switched off the lash completely, then brought it down hard on the railing in front of them. "Hold the flashlight here," she ordered coolly.
A panel hung askew, but it was not loose enough to pry out just yet. Nova seized a shard of glass a little smaller than her hand and grunted very softly when it sliced her palm. Gripping hard around the blood, she prised the handle open and exposed half a dozen small, softly glowing crystal chips. "Here," she said, offering the monolash in her slippery hand. "Take care, they'll burn upon contact with your skin."
Without a further word, Nova stepped up to the railing and vaulted down. Upon landing, she rolled neatly to her feet and sped toward the largest panel, incised with scratches too regular to be random and set with oddly-shaped buttons. As soon as she could make out the sweep of the thing in the light reflected in glittering bursts, she began searching for patterns which might reveal the functions of the various controls.
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Post by JesterJoker on Jul 31, 2007 1:49:00 GMT -5
Vespasian looked up from the mirror surface and at Illunova. Now that they had a reprieve from the horde of monsters, he was beginning to size her up. He thought he had a distinctive subtlety to his perceptions, but this woman seemed too intense to share the same ability.
He nodded, puzzling her personality as she talked. This tall, dark woman sounded brisk, businesslike, and didn't have a lot of time for games. Of course, neither of them did right now; but she seemed natural this way, and that unnerved him. Her height didn't help his feelings either.
"Stellar?" he asked. "That thing's powered on condensed stars? Your crystals aren't mine, apparently." As she opened the panel to what was maybe the power generator and gave him the whip, he set the flashlight on the rail and peered at the electronics.
Vespasian poked them and a stream of sparks flew across the mirror surface. It looked damn cool, he had to admit, but the woman's vault to the interior of the bridge had looked much more interesting. "Hey, you know what?" he yelled down to Nova. "I don't think I got your name!"
Right then, one of the monsters thumped onto the mirror and shattered a hole around it. Shards jabbed Vespasian's arm and he winced against them. Vespasian whirled toward it, ready with the whip.
The monster, one of a million more, was a dark purple, a color which might once have resembled his hair. It was missing one arm, and its flesh rolled upon its body like it had been in an oven for a hour too many, but it was five times his size and lurched toward him.
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Post by TravelerOfTheWays on Aug 6, 2007 10:32:01 GMT -5
Of course you didn't get my name, Nova thought irritably, I don't go around advertising it. The venom in her mental tone took her aback, and she considered it. She must be wound very tightly for such an emotional display to cross her mind. After all, little inclination as she had to bond with strangers, it was perfectly reasonable question.
"Illunova," she replied simply. She saw no reason to include her clan name and left it at that.
She was pondering asking his name in reply, establishing a note of civility, but just then her head jerked up at the sound of shattering glass. At the sight of a creature attacking her companion, she had to reminded herself that she accomplish more here, deciphering the ship's system, than fending off a corpse when the gunman had proved himself capable of keeping himself alive.
He wielded her whip remarkably well for someone who she assumed had never handled a monolash before. It was just as capable of parting one's one flesh as one's enemies, which tended to render its users either useless with fear or quickly maimed. She yanked her attention back to the controls.
The most important controls, she reasoned, would be located along the perimeter of the panel, the easiest for a pilot of any shape or size to press, lacking a large button somewhere in the middle. Along the edge, she saw several symbols repeated and doubted that any of those was a power switch. A flat disc, an oval darker in color than the rest of the panel, caught her eye, and she brushed her fingers over it.
A rumble built under her feet and seemed to run up the walls, rattling the ship until she feared the hull might tear itself apart. With a whine that made her eardrums ache, bright blue lights suddenly lit up the area. The rumble quieted to a vibrating hum, one that felt like power. Some of the buttons on the panel flashed alight. It stood to reason, she thought, that the control to ready the ship for take-off would be found near the power disc, so she depressed a button just below the oval.
Nothing happened. Either there was security feature to prevent unauthorized people from controlling the ship, or there was insufficient power to complete any further operations. Judging by the flickering state of the lights and the lack of a security check, she guessed it was the latter.
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