Gizmo
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Wander's attacks brought a section of the gorge wall to her left rippling with cracks, sheets of striated computronium sliding down to the floor of the geological feature while the anitbodies crawling upon it struggled in vain to avoid being crushed beneath it. The troopers dodged flying rubble as they ran full out over twisted metal and dessicated flesh spread out around the massive blackened scorch marks left by Corona's blasts, superheated nanite solution steaming in noxious clouds from the debris. Following Eclipse's lead they concentrated their own rifle fire on the pockets of six-armed meat puppets that managed to get past the Terran and Lor commanders, the sound of laser punching holes in protruding cybernetics almost lost amidst the sound of churning stone and terrible bellows coming from behind them as the mole-slug proved efficient at destroying the evidence of the bloody swath they were cutting toward the comm relay. The closer they got, however, the more they caught up to the main body of the charging antibodies, their numbers becoming denser as they skittered over the bodies of their fallen brethren to surge forward, claws glinting in the sporadic red glare of battle.
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Alright, I'll get a GM post up and we'll move Roulette to the top of the initiative order. > 22 - Roulette - Uninjured, 4HP 21 - Corona - Uninjured, Flat-Footed, 0HP 19 - Eclipse - Uninjured, 2HP 17 - Wander - Uninjured, 2HP 14 - Antibody Regiment 1 - Unaffected 14 - Antibody Regiment 2 - Unaffected 05 - Squad C - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] 05 - Squad E - Disrupted x1 [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] 05 - Squad W - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] 05 - Squad R - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
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If Wail uses Emotion Control 13 (Extras: Area [General, Burst, 60ft radius], Linked [Trip], Flaws: Limited [Fear], Range 2 [Touch]) [7PP] + Trip 13 (Extras: Area [General, Burst], Linked [Emotion Control], Flaws: Range [Touch], Feats: Improved Trip) [14PP] (Fearsome Roar) [21PP]to try to control the crowd some, does he still need to reduce the rank or is that strictly for Damage effects?
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"Ah, shieldmaiden! Indeed, I was about to contact you," the autonomic machine intelligence replied over the comm line before the Night Cycle rolled back out of the garage and onto the driveway. Redbird had had the presence of mind to revert the vehicle back to something less conspicuous and to generate her holographic avatar walking next to it holding the handlebars, dressed in a stately chauffeur's uniform sized to her statuesque proportions. "I believe something may be amiss here. I have been attempting to reach the elder shadow walker on his communication device. I am familiar with the routines of each of your daily cycles and there is a statistical near certainty he would be awake at this time." The avatar's expression was dark, glancing about warily, half expecting an enemy ambush to appear from behind the landscaping. "He has been teaching me of human games of stratagem and it was my turn in the chess when we left. Our mission offworld has given me time to deduce his method, I was eager to resume the match. Could the Communion have returned to Earth without our knowledge?"
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Neither of Trevor's parents gave a start at Erin's sudden appearance. Ted didn't even look up from the almost implausibly thin laptop he was working away on but Janet at least pursed her lips and looked over to the auburn haired woman. "It's not gossip, it-- Mmh. I'm sorry, dear. Rude, regardless," she admitted reluctantly, standing near the fireplace with her arms folded across her chest. "We've only met briefly previously and yes, given the reason I was coming it seemed prudent to do some research. Frankly, yes, I thought this might be triggering for you but there's no need for melodramatics. We're not a high school rumour mill and self-deprication is never endearing; no one thinks you're a 'psycho'." She managed to convey a rolling of the eyes with her delivery of the word even if she kept the actual gesture from disturbing her high cheekbones. "Speaking with attorney," Ted interjected, still largely engrossed whatever he was doing but not wanting Erin's actual question go unanswered amidst discussions of societal niceties. "Texted as he left. Fifteen minutes, about." He finally looked up as he said that, frowning slightly and considering way he'd seen Trevor drive while picking him up from the airport. "Five," he corrected himself before resuming his work.
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Antibody Battalion Toughness Save vs DC 37: 1d20+7 14 That completely wipes out the first wave of antibodies, so the squads can advance this round unimpeded, adding to their distance from the mole-slug! As they get closer to the communication relay the antibodies are going to get denser, mind you. First, though, Roulette has a chance to prepare or otherwise act on his turn if you like, Morrison.
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By rights the manor shouldn't have felt any different. It had always been considerably too large for three people to fill even discounting the network of caves below, had always had plenty of quiet spaces where one could go undisturbed for long stretches of time. Still, knowing that there was no chance to walking in on Travis reading in the library, tinkering with his chemistry equipment or pouring tea from a kettle made the entire building feel entirely more empty. "--death before." Ted's voice wasn't pitched to carry but Erin's hearing was good enough to pick it up coming from the living room closest to the main entrance from where she was in the hallway. "Exactly my point," Janet replied, her word quick and clipped in a way that made the younger woman think of rabbit punches. "The girl's traumatized, improvement or no. The 'ripping off a band-aid' method does not apply here, Ted, you don't know how she might have reacted. You weren't entering data into a damned spreadsheet." Ted made a sound in the back of his throat that indicated just what he thought of that attempt at insight. "Underestimate her. Done now, anyway." The sound Janet made in response was actually quite similar.
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Antibody Battalion Toughness Save vs DC 29: 1d20+9 23 Toughness Save vs DC 22: 1d20+8 16 21 - Corona - Uninjured, Flat-Footed, 0HP 19 - Eclipse - Uninjured, 2HP > 17 - Wander - Uninjured, 2HP 14 - Antibody Battalion - Disrupted x2, Shaken 07 - Roulette - Uninjured, 4HP 05 - Squad C - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ] 05 - Squad E - Disrupted x1 [ ] [ ] [ ] 05 - Squad W - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ] 05 - Squad R - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ]
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Wail Initiative: 1d20+6 18
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The waves of nausea and sharp pain at the base of his skull caught LaMarr off guard for a moment but the experienced hero gritted his teeth and powered through. Whatever the hallucinations were trying to convince him he was seeing had to contend with what he knew was in front of him having spent the better part of an hour keeping an eye on the audience in front of him. Lashing out instinctively was only going to get somebody hurt or undo all of the restoration that had only just been completed; he needed to think it through. The girl bursting into flames toward the front of the seating didn't mesh with rest of the biting, clawing mob so she might not have been part of the illusion. With little more than a grimace as fingernails failed to bite into his superhumanly tough skin he waded through the mob, pushing the affected movie goers out of the way with broad hands as he headed straight for the biggest threat to the crowd's safety. "Child, I need you to calm yourself," he intoned in a commanding baritone before wrapping his arms in a bear hug around the teen engulfed in flames. LaMarr could have placed his hand in a camp fire and only gotten uncomfortably warm but these flames began burning his exposed skin almost immediately, confirming that this was no mundane conflagration. Tilting his chin to keep his beard from alighting and resigning himself to the destruction of yet another perfectly good dress shirt, he bellowed to the room, "Whichever fool is doing this, you've got ONE chance to stop it and I'll only break your nose! You don't walk away from hurting my kids!"
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Wail Toughness Save vs. DC 25: 1d20+13 24 He takes a bruise!
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Alright, then he's going to move to grab the fire girl in a bear hug, trying to smother the flames some. I assume there's going to be some Aura Damage involved! Initiate Grapple; All-Out Attack 5, -2 Circumstance: 1d20+11 24 Opposed Grapple Check: 1d20+23 25 Argh. He'll spend that HP he just got to reroll the second check if it's necessary. Also worth noting he's got Improved Pin.
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Wail Will Save vs DC 20: 1d20+12 26 If Wail's on the ground floor, he's closer to the girl on fire than the boy with the prehensile hair, right?
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Ted shifted to turn halfway away from Erin, unclear how to respond to Erin's emotions at the same time he was keeping a tight lid on whatever he was feeling himself. "Six days past." There was a beat of silence that suggested he was going to leave it there before he added a little more quietly, "Peaceful. In his sleep." His mouth twisted slightly like he'd bitten into something with an unexpectedly sour flavour, unsure what to make of it. Knowing that Travis' end had been as comfortable as possible should have been a comfort but given the life he'd led and the energetic zeal that had characterized the man it seemed oddly incongruous. Janet took another small step forward, glancing briefly at Ted before turning her full attention to Erin. "Travis took a turn for the worse about a three weeks ago. He had a number of acquaintances with rather specialized fields, as you may have realized, but in the end it was just his time." She frowned a bit at that, the rote phrase unusually saccharine for the forcefully direct woman. Neither she nor her ex-husband had much experience with or talent for providing comfort and they were equally unused to floundering like this. "We've been helping see that everything is put in order but Trevor has insisted on shouldering most of that himself, of course. He should be back soon." There was another awkward pause as she looked at Ted to see if he had anything to add but the square-jawed stock trader seemed to be off in his own world. "Can I... get you something, dear? Wine? Tea?"
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Sure, that seems fine. Keith and Paige know each other from fighting side by side in '93; there's a lot of strong feelings tied up in that so the Scarab could probably pick up on some specifics if you like. I feel like 1-800-JUSTICE probably crossed paths with the previous Scarab, too, but if nothing else the Scarab could make at least one of the Knowledge checks to recognize Wail at a glance.
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"That's fine, dear, just a suggestion," Janet told her placatingly, raising her hands as if worried she'd frighten Erin off and moving slowly from where the foyer met the hall toward Ted. "I do think--" "Don't handle her," Ted interrupted tersely, irritable impatience creeping into his otherwise carefully neutral tone. He quite obviously did not wish to be there talking to either of them but between Erin's terse demand for answers and Janet's attempts to ease into the topic at hand it was the latter that seemed to bother him more. The raven haired woman didn't so much bristle as give him a look that masterfully managed to be something other than the glare it implied. "Empathy is not the same thing as manipulation, Ted. You can't just--" "My father passed." Ted articulated the words clearly, almost painstakingly, as though worried that he might be forced to repeat himself otherwise. He met Erin's eyes directly but had some difficulty focusing on the young woman, looking slightly past her and through the door she'd backed herself against. His lips parted slightly, about to say something else but closed again in silence. Next to him Janet let out a breath of sigh and clasped her hands in front of her.
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Alright, here's how this is going to work! Our heroes and their squads are three 'spaces' from the giant mole-slug, represented below as [ ] [ ] [ ], with a 'space' being an abstract measure of distance. They can move fast enough to maintain that distance but each time a squad is Disrupted they'll slow down and lose a 'space'. They can also choose to do nothing but run flat out, not attacking, to add a 'space' to their total. Run out of spaces and the mole-slug will catch up with them which... would be bad. Meanwhile, the antibodies are attacking from the opposite direction, which is where our heroes want to head anyway. These are more of the same 'green' troops they fought before but thanks to their overwhelming numbers they'll be represented by a 'battalion', meaning a +9 force modifier for those following along with the field battle rules. The Coalition forces are six rounds of normal movement away from the communication relay. They need to either last that long - without getting gobbled up or overrun - or just demolish the antibody battalion to punch through to their goal. Antibody Battalion Initiative: 1d20 14 > 21 - Corona - Uninjured, 1HP19 - Eclipse - Uninjured, 2HP17 - Wander - Uninjured, 2HP14 - Antibody Battalion - Unaffected07 - Roulette - Uninjured, 4HP05 - Squad C - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ]05 - Squad E - Disrupted x1 [ ] [ ] [ ]05 - Squad W - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ]05 - Squad R - Unaffected [ ] [ ] [ ]
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"Indeed!" Redbird reported back over Wander's earpiece, her voice buzzing slightly with what the Terran recognized as a note of battlelust. "More of the crude drones traveling at ground level from poleward!" Erin remembered enough of the briefing on the planet to know that meant roughly the same direction they were headed, probably coming out of the settlement turned communications relay to meet them. "The computronium is effecting my sensors but conservative estimates put their numbers in, oh, several hundred, certainly! You should be seeing them coming over the walls of the canyon any moment." Sure enough little reflective dots were already skittering over the lip of the crevice like a tide of spiders at the edge of Eclipse's cybernetically enhanced vision. They were going to have to fight their way through the antibodies to reach their goal and the longer it took them to get there the more chance the enemy would have to marshal its forces and overwhelm them. They didn't have long to dwell on that before the ground beneath their feet shook violently and the source of the rumbling behind them revealed itself. A beast hundreds of meters across erupted from the bottom of the gorge, looking like some hideous cross between a mole and a slug, with six gnashing mouths space equidistant around its bulbous head! Wander abruptly realized what had carved the canyon out of the rock in the first place at the same time the Coalition soldiers recognized the telltale mishmash of metal plating and invasive tubing dotting the creature's terrible bulk revealing that it too had been suborned to the Communion's purpose. Computronium crumbled as the invertebrate monster advanced with a garbled electronic roar and a reek of foul outgassing, pinning them between it and the rush of drones!
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Keith LaMarr didn't have much use for horror movies. He wasn't all that much of a cinema enthusiast to begin with but once you'd splattered a certain number of shambling corpses and broken a certain number of blood sucker's fangs off on bite-proof knuckles the genre lost some of it's novelty. Still, he was always happy to see a piece of the neighbourhood's history preserved and the profits from the Giza's re-opening were going to go a long way toward funding programs he'd been hounding the school administration over for years. If that meant he ended up standing at the back of the theater rather than subjecting the newly restored seats to his considerable weight, spending more time watching the audience than watching the screen it was a small price to pay. At least it wasn't some kung fu picture. Ninjas were worse than zombies.
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Dramatic or not, the phone message hadn't given LaMarr much information to work with, leaving him scanning the suburbs looking for anything out of place. A child sized bicycle abandoned in a yard, a missing dog poster stabled to the side of a post, Paige Cline having a silent conversation with thin air, water running down a driveway to the sewer grate from an above ground pool being emptied, a pile of ads and flyers sitting in front of the house of the one family who hadn't been outside to collect them yet. Nothing worth further attention. Mouth turning down slightly into a frown, he continued walking along, eyes peeled. Something wasn't sitting right with him, still, the familiar nagging feeling that he was missing something, a feeling that often preceded the room he was in exploding or something similar. He supposed that was just a side-effect of living as long as he had. Paige would understand, he could ask her about it when she was done speaking with her invisible friend. It was quite the coincidence seeing her here, after all. The civics teacher's frown became a grimace as he massaged a growing pain above one eye. It was a coincidence, so why was he so sure it wasn't anything important? Well, obviously she wasn't actually talking to an invisible person, that would have been noteworthy, she was just talking to someone he wasn't looking at. Someone he still wasn't looking at even as he made the attempt specifically. Muttering something about telepaths the broad-shouldered mountain of a man walked over to the television host, keeping his attention focused on her with an application of iron clad will.
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Wail Will Save vs DC 25: 1d20+12 25 Just barely!
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"Out. Back shortly," Ted explained in his terse manner, words almost seeming to resent passing over his lips as he added, "Wasn't planned." Out of his office and no longer behind his desk he looked like a man acutely aware of the space he was occupying, his frame perhaps an inch shorter than his son but significantly broader at the shoulder, broader than Erin could ever imagine Travis having been even in his prime. The expertly tailored suit he wore helped, slate grey with a faint, almost invisible pinstripe, but he still looked profoundly uncomfortable to be standing there talking to her. "This kitchen looks as though it was stocked from a supermarket," an exasperated female voice criticized from down the fall before Janet Pryce-Hunter rounded the corner, raven black hair pinned up over the neck of a blood red blouse in a style that rode the line between thoughtlessly casual and impossibly chic. She paused in her tracks as she saw Erin, a mere beat as she assimilated new information and carried on. "I didn't hear you arrive, dear. Has anyone...?" Ted made a flat sound in the negative in the back of his throat and Janet pressed her lips together into a thin line in response. "That may be best. Why don't you sit down, dear?"
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Nassor regarded Stesha's verdant hair less with surprise than with put-upon resignation. "Ah. Well, it is nice to be right now and then, certainly." Raising his hands slowly with his palms toward the florakinetic to make it clear that there was nothing in them, he placed them behind his shaved head with the fingers laced, the movement not coincidentally spreading open his jacket to show that there was no obvious holster or scabbard within reach. Crouching, he pointedly got down on his knees, hands still behind his head and never breaking eye contact with Stesha. "I promise you that I am not here to start a fight. I am attempting to prevent one. I appreciate your position but I do not believe this can wait." His words were carefully measured and calm but he clearly didn't want to risk underestimating his new acquaintance. "I could speak with the younger sister, the Jack of Coins? Even Pique if necessary; he has already been watching us from the rooftop for some time." "Well, that's a bit embarrassing," the elder swordsman in question remarked dryly to Chris as he watched Nassor nod directly toward them from the street.
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Sure enough Jill's grappling line allowed her to keep pace with Wildcat and at that speed it didn't take them long to reach the strip mall. On a Saturday Green Elm was about as busy as the West End natives had ever seen it. Even if the collection of stores and eateries hadn't quite lived up to its own ambitions as a shopping destination and almost a third of the store fronts they could see from the far side of the small parking lot were advertizing either space for rent or blowout clearance sales there were still a few dozen people milling about. In one corner of that parking lot a small white tent had been set up with a folding table in front of it and a banner proclaiming 'MAUL' in aggressively pointy font alongside a combination of smaller text and starbursts that might have benefited from greater input by a competent graphic designer. Two women in their late teens or early twenties wearing similarly garishly branded t-shirts were in the process of handing out bottles of the stuff to passersby from a few big blue barrels packed with ice, while a scruffy looking teen with a patchy beard recorded promotional footage with a camera rig that was a little too big for him to wield easily.
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"Well, that explains a lot," the thick-necked Broan in Roulette's squad commented to the trooper to his left as they watched the Zultasian bounce shots back and forth across the enemy. The Leche soldier chittered something that the standard issue translators had some trouble with but the gist seemed to be that she wasn't sure that it didn't raise more questions than it answered. As rifle barrels cooled, the Coalition soldiers took stock. Eclipse's squad had taken some relatively minor injuries - the Za'ak who'd objected to Roulette's attitude wasn't going to be doing much with his off hand for the foreseeable future - but nobody reported any casualties after their first skirmish with the enemy. There was no question that their commanders had been the deciding factor in routing the ambush and even Wander's group seemed to be warming to her in that light. They didn't have time to chat about their newfound admiration, however, as the ground began to rumble again from behind them in the direction they'd come. This time the sound was more distant but much, much larger and getting closer quickly. "Uh... double-time, ma'am?" Ekna asked Wander a little uncertainly as the rest of the troopers quickly formed up. They certainly couldn't stay put and fight the whole of the world's Communion forces, after all.
