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BunniesOfDoomPaved Wilderness - Scorched Gorge
Lvl 15 Ms Fortune (62/150) and Chucho the Polterpup
Roland’s @Archmage MC Therion’s @Yankee
Word Count: 1960
Even if the well-traveled, sun-baked road was a little bumpy, with plenty of cracks and its fair share of potholes, the experience of simply watching the environment roll by from the comfort of a vinyl barstool was nothing to scoff at. The magnificent painted desert, rolling plains, and enormous buttes, interspersed with scrubland-clad serpentine rivers that shone like diamonds in the afternoon sun, possessed a beautiful grandeur, especially for a city-bound alley cat who’d missed her chance to see the Sandswept Sky in all its glory. At the same time, the sheer scale of the Paved Wilderness meant that the surroundings changed slowly, with only the occasional shack or race track to break up the peaceful monotony.
That meant that staring off into the distance for minutes at a time, especially with the trailer’s toastiness and the engine’s growly purr, was a rather soporific experience, and Nadia soon found herself struggling to stay awake. “Hooh…” she sighed, leaning more and more on the bartop as her eyelids drooped. “Guess I’m more tired than I thought…” All this dry air was making her thirsty, too, and the more her eyes rested on all the bottles of booze stocked by the semitruck’s onboard bar, the more she licked her lips. The felonious feline managed to reign in her base impulses, though; given how risky it must be to pick up a hitchhiker, how could she possibly think to repay the driver’s kindness by stealing from her? Her mind began to conjure up images of Limsa Lominscuttle Town, especially Heaven’s Edge, with a whole ocean’s worth of cool, refreshing water to soak in followed by a round of free drinks from Karin Kanzuki afterward, all shared with Ace of course. As she imagined paradise, her eyelids’ gradual descent turned into a headlong plummet, and Nadia passed out.
“Hey. Hey. He-eeey.”
The feral jolted awake suddenly, almost falling out of her stool before she remembered where she was. While its engine continued to putter idly, the Steeltusk had stopped, and before Nadia unfurled a network of red rocky canyons littered by rotund barrel cacti and uniquely crooked Joshua trees. All the heat around here was making the air swim, but no matter how surreal they looked, the wildlife the cat burglar saw were no mirages. She witnessed half-racks of ribs that crawled through the crevices like centipedes, mothlike puffs that left trails of cheesy dust as they flapped their crispy orange wings, and peppery scorpions with red-hot stingers. Nadia had to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
“Welcome to Scorched Gorge,” a familiar tired, reedy voice said. Nadia looked down to see the little truck driver staring up at her. Her eyes were impossibly world-weary for how old she looked, which was more than a little off-putting. Still, Nadia had reached her destination in one piece (or at least, with all her pieces together) so she could hardly raise any objections. The girl crossed her arms. “I had to poke you a good five or six times. You sure you’re okay, miss?”
Nadia wiped the drool from her lip with the back of her hand, then gave her most reassuring smile. “Yeah yeah, I’m good! Just dozed off or somethin’. Thanks ‘fur’ the ride!”
“Uh huh. Whatever you say, kiddo. Well, if you need anything, the name’s Piper. Gimme a call.”
Seemingly unconvinced, the driver stepped away, and Nadia hopped down from the truck to the dusty ground. Chucho followed, almost invisible in the bright sunlight. The catgirl took a few steps away, looking around, then reached up to her ear. She’d honestly forgotten about the linkpearls for a while, but hearing from Therion earlier reminded her, so now seemed like a good time to repay the favor. “Hey guys! I’m at the place, and I gotta say, it’s Scorched Gorge-ous. Might, uh, need a ride back though. So when you’re done checkin’ out that other spot, don’t forget to pick me up, or I’ll take it purr-sonally!”
She’d already spotted Roland and Therion’s destination on the other side of all the canyons. Tall, blocky, and gray-brown in tone, the Refinery stuck out like a sore thumb amidst all the pristine natural beauty. Her sharp eyes could make out a strange, dark-red sigil plastered on the side of one of the buildings. She couldn’t see any people or vehicles from this distance, but the fumes billowing from its four smokestacks suggested some kind of activity.
“If you’re meeting friends near here, I reckon you all oughta stay away from that factory,” the truck driver advised.
Nadia swiveled her head back around to see the girl seated at her own bar, a glass full of ice and murky brown liquid in her hand. Both were momentarily affronted -Piper by Nadia’s 180-degree head turn and Nadia by Piper’s premature alcoholism- but after a moment both managed to get over one another’s eccentricities. The feral turned her body around sheepishly. “Uh, why?”
“I hear there’s some real odd folks ‘round there. Strange critters, too. The kind you hear, but can’t see, not ‘til they’re already breathin’ down the back of your neck.”
Despite the heat, a chill ran down Nadia’s spine. Which she thought was honestly weird, given all the horrific things she’d already seen and overcome. “I’ll let ‘em know, but we can look after ourselves. Besides, what if there’s treasure there?”
Piper blinked. “Treasure?”
Nadia nodded enthusiastically. Since the girl had done her a favor, she didn’t mind sharing even if it meant a little more competition. “Yeah! The whole region’s gone crazy over this big scavenger hunt some shipping company started after they lost their cargo. Turn in their loot, and you could win big! That’s why we’re out here.”
“Huh! Well, I’ll be.” Piper scratched her chin lazily. “Guess I’ll let the others know when they get here. Thanks, kid.”
Already regretting her choice somewhat due to the trucker’s patronizing tone and the prospect of even more competition, Nadia moseyed away with Chucho right behind her. Once she reached the nearest precipice, she began to survey Scorched Gorge with narrowed eyes, searching for anything that might have come from the crashed freighter. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to locate a sphere of compressed salvage almost as tall as she was, but unfortunately, it somehow seemed to be perfectly balanced on top of a sheer rocky spire. The feral did a double take, baffled. “Huh? How does that happen?” Chucho didn’t have any answers, though, so Nadia had no choice but to roll her eyes and head on over.
After jumping down into the canyon, she meandered through it at a leisurely pace, preoccupied by scattered pieces of what seemed like ancient ruins. She stopped a couple times to pick through skeletons or pieces of prehistoric pottery for anything valuable, and during one such perusal Chucho seemed to catch a scent on the wind that intrigued him. “Chuch? Where ya goin’, boy?” He floated out of sight, and when Nadia followed him, she found a bizarre plant with bright pink flowers and huge orange stamens that looked like bottles more than anything else. Curious, she pulled one off and sniffed it. It looked like a fruit, but it smelled…spicy?
Just then, a strange noise caused her ears to perk up. Nadia peered up at the nearby canyon wall to find two Ribblepedes staring at her. “Whoa!” Reacting instinctively, she jumped back and hurled the fruit at them. It struck the bigger one and burst into bright orange liquid, coating it, and the smaller one promptly dove at the other, causing both to plummet down to the canyon floor and roll away in a heap of scrabbling, bonelike limbs. No longer alarmed but instead mildly concerned, Nadia watched them tussle, absently licking at some of the fluid that had spattered on her knuckle. She immediately blinked in surprise–it was hot sauce! “Weird…but cool!” Nadia turned to continue on her way, a little faster and more situationally aware than before.
After another minute, she reached the spire. At only around thirty feet tall, Nadia figured she’d have no problem reaching it, but before she could get started she ran afoul of the wildlife again. This time she noticed the checker-shrouded creature well before it reached her, thanks in part to the noise it made. “Bunger, bunger, bunger!” it hollered, charging on curly-fry legs with curly-fry tusks extended.
Smirking, Nadia stood her ground, then leaped up as it charged and somersaulted onto its back. Surprisingly sturdy, the BBQ Bunger bore her weight but went into an immediate frenzy, running this way and that as it tried to buck its passenger off. “Yee-haw!” Nadia laughed as she held on, her tail and arms extended for balance. Only when the Bunger tried to ram into a rocky outcropping did she crouch down and sink her claws in to brace herself. The next moment the critter slammed into the stone and stunned itself, ripe for Nadia to finish the job. “Think fast, food!” She detached her tail, tossed it up like she saw Zenkichi do with Ragnell, then flipped up to catch it and slash down. Hardened like a blade, her tail neatly cut the Bunger into halves, its googly eyes becoming spirals as sweet, savory barbecue sauce eked from within.
Nadia hesitated for a moment, her arms on her hips, then shook her head. “Okay. I gotta know.” She ran over to the nearest river to wash her hands -better than nothing, right?- then carved out a portion of the BBQ Bunger to stuff in her mouth. Much to her delighted surprise, it was identical to an actual barbecue burger. Of course, she’d already eaten plenty of burger for lunch, so Nadia only helped herself to a little bit of the bugsnack’s body before it began to dissolve. But even that was enough to metamorphose the feral’s right arm into something altogether unnatural.
“...AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!”
Even after the initial panic wore off, Nadia’s heart pounded as she queasily tried to come to terms with what had happened. Most of her right arm had been replaced by appropriately large, spring-shaped curly fries, approximating the original limb. Her fingerless glove had been replaced by checkered wrapper, and strips of bacon had replaced her fingers. She flexed them experimentally, aghast. “Okay…okay. You are what you eat, I guess?” As she wondered how feasible it would be to trick Juri into eating bugsnax, Chucho sniffed at her hand, prompting her to jerk away, horrified. “Knock it off! I’m not a hamburglar!” The bigger issue was the salvage, since she no longer had claws on her right hand to climb with, and her grip was woefully greasy. Ever inventive, however, Nadia found a solution: she could extend her new limb like a spring in order to grab onto better handholds. Doing roughly the same with her other hand via muscle fiber and pressurized blood, she managed to scale the spire, reach the salvage, and push against it with her shoulder until it rolled off and fell down into the canyon below.
“Alright!” Nadia gave Chucho a high five, then winced. Only when she finally began to consider her next step did she realize her much, much bigger problem: how in the world she’d be getting that loot wherever it needed to go. “Oh, hell…”
Things were decidedly less whimsical, though, over by the Refinery. Neither Roland nor Therion saw any signs of life as they drew closer, but the whole place was locked up tight, practically a citadel of concrete, stone, and metal with only a few heavy, reinforced doors and no exterior windows anywhere near the ground floor. All the doors featured mechanical deadbolts sealed by keycard access, invulnerable to conventional lockpicking. Outside of the ability to fly or scale shear walls, the only possible means of ingress seemed to lie at the end of tire tracks: a heavy garage-style segmented door that safeguarded some sort of loading bay, kept in place by the weight of the door itself. While the newcomers couldn’t see anyone, they could see old-fashioned security cameras, so even though their approach garnered no response, it felt like someone was watching.
Paved Wilderness - Northwestern Wastes
Edward’s @DracoLunaris Blazermate and Sectonia’s @Archmage MC Zenkichi’s @MULTI_MEDIA_MAN Juri’s @Zoey Boey
When Zenkichi, Sectonia, and Blazermate arrived from the sky to assist the Mammoth and its occupants against the gang of Locust marauders, the battle began to swing in the Coalition’s favor, but not without a heaping helping of confusion. The Gears didn’t know who these newcomers were or what their intentions might be after all, and when more fighting broke out atop and even inside their vehicle, the skirmish became even more of a scramble than before. The situation in the Mammoth was helter-skelter, with rapidly changing and often conflicting orders dividing the troopers’ attention between the assailants outside, the unidentified infiltrator wrecking havoc, and keeping the giant machine running at all.
Things were even more chaotic among the units of the Locust assault force, scattered around their target and presented with multiple new bogeys. Wheeling around to try and deal with Sectonia or Zenkichi guaranteed that the COG war machines would gun them down, while not addressing the new threat practically guaranteed a crash into the bug queen’s summoned swords. The dangerous but clumsy choppers got picked off quickly, while the slow Bloodmounts made easy targets. Prowlers and Reavers were more flexible, but as the Locust rapidly dwindled it became clear that victory would be a pipe dream. The retreat order was given, and the last Prowler -which happened to be the newest into the fray- broke off to flee through a swampy ravine. Reavers zoomed away in different directions, and the battle concluded with a decisive victory for the Coalition.
Of course, reports quickly reached the Mammoth’s crew chief about the theft committed during the chaos. Eyewitness accounts described a maniacal woman who fought and defeated veteran Gears barehanded. They said that she shrugged off Gnasher slugs like one might swat flies, then warped away through some kind of magical wormhole, taking all the Ficsit cargo they’d recovered with her. With no sign of the fugitive, the chief could do little but order the Mammoth to be stopped to recover the damaged vehicles. One of the Centaurs had been totaled, but the LAV had enough horsepower to drag the wreck back inside so that salvage and repair could begin in earnest.
If Zenkichi and the others expected to receive medals of honor for their help, though, they would come away disappointed. The troops remained standoffish with them, unconvinced of their motives and suspicious of their involvement with the inexplicable theft. At the same time, though, the woman barking at them through the Mammoth’s loudspeaker tried to downplay the deed with a braggadocious tone, saying, “That stuff we lost? Psh! Small potatoes compared to the haul we took in this morning, and the haul we’re headed toward now! You pipsqueaks wanna see some real action? Follow along and you’ll get to see what happens when we turn this BFG on Sweet Tooth’s circus! Hoorah!” With that, the Mammoth got moving again, headed east with its sights set on a much, much bigger target: the Carnival of Carnage.
Of course, unless Edward’s scout drones were listening in, he and Juri were too occupied by their own payday to catch wind of the COGs’ plans. With just a little finagling, the red chests they finessed from the Mammoth’s hold popped open like trophy cases, proudly showing off the three firearms contained within each.
Once the skirmish with the Mammoth ended, the Seekers had to pack up and move on. With Edward’s drones performing reconnaissance, those still headed toward Highertower got enough of a lay of the land to plot out an effective route. Beyond the boggy badlands lay a biome of oil, tar, and silt, bruised black and blue by untold years of excavation and extraction to fuel the Paved Wilderness and lands beyond. The flatter areas had been turned into sprawling oilfields, while the more mountainous parts were an oil-rich ecosystem all their own, where there dwelt bizarre lifeforms touched by the strangeness of the Outback down south, like colorful Muk, quiet Lurkers, and predatory Rompopolo. It wasn’t an ideal route, but with half of the biome ablaze in an infernal Firespring that filled the sky with smoke, it was better than the alternative. Passing through there brought the Seekers toward Highertower from the south, and after ascending through a canyon roadway up from Oilwell Basin, they crested a hill that gave them a good look at what they’d be dealing with.
The tower certainly lived up to the legend. That sheet metal spire was a legitimate skyscraper, dwarfing everything in the region in height if not girth. Wind’s Gasp? No comparison. The Rocket League Arena? Nowhere near. Noctis, a town built up into a mountain? Close, but no cigar. It was comical in its repetitious simplicity, especially since the only means of ascent seemed to be ramps around the outside, but it was apparently sturdy enough to withstand a collision with a Ficsit freighter. This zone, perched on the precipice of Empty Space, had always been a hotspot for conflict, but with Ficsit’s scavenger hunt ongoing, it looked a lot more like an actual warzone.
There were dozens of psychos camped out everywhere, identifiable by their minimalist orange attire, white masks, and ramshackle weaponry. They wielded all kinds of guns, as well as machetes and saws fused together from scrap. Opposing those gangs were all kinds of soldiers and mercenaries, entrenched in a ceaseless war of attrition. Everyone was fighting over a dozen entrenched stockpiles, capturing and then attempting to extract Ficsit loot via payload while keeping the other factions at bay. The various factions weren't making much progress, since any time one got close to extracting a payload, the others tended to gang up on it. Big team battles were going down farther away from Highertower itself, with cars, trucks, and tanks all going at it in vicious bursts, then limping away to lick their wounds and prepare for the next round. Over everything blazed the purple light of a nearly-full Flame Clock, attached imperiously to Highertower itself. In this place, both danger and opportunity abounded, promising a rich payday to those who picked their fights wisely.
