Lady Selune

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Operation: Ground the Harpy

Till would follow the group out, having now gingerly donned his coat once more. Adjusting his cufflinks slightly, he would slip his sunglasses back on, then turn to look towards Yonaka with an expression of slight incredulity on his face. "May I have a cigarette please? As for Paris..." He raised his hand up and looked towards the sky- seeing where the sun was. Looking back down at his watch, and with a little umming and aahing, he would point towards a direction. "Paris is North-East from here. Only the Germans are permitted cars, so we'll have to walk there... And unfortunately for you, I happen to be a male within fighting age, so we'll be attracting attention."

Lady Selune Wishes to RP With You! [Always Looking] [Ignore Post Count (It's All Bumps)]

Bump

The Ward

There was no sound at first- just the echo of the large man's voice as it spilled down the gaping maw of blackness and away, through the facility. There was no strange mechanical voice, no synthesised garble. Just unending silence, only broken by the creak of metal and the groan of...

The groan of something distinctly alive. The echoing nature of the facility made it impossible to tell where the sound had come from- it ricoched off of walls, floors and cielings, bounced about the group, and seemed to come from every which angle at once. It was followed by a shuffling noise, distant and faint, but audible, present... And coming closer.

Paradigm Shift: Agents of Fate

Jennifer Briggs

Jennifer Briggs

Basics

Name: Jennifer Briggs
Age: 20
Gender: Female
Height/Weight: 176cm/66kg
(Former) Occupation: Student (Media and Communications)
Appearance:

Biography

Born in Queens, New York City, one would be hard pressed to think of Jenny's childhood as anything unique or special. Her family were lower middle class, with her father a sanitation worker and her mother a teacher. Although studious and with an excellent work ethic, most of her life went by unremarkably. Even the first Violet Dawn swept by, with Jenny, much like the rest of the world, thinking it a tragic disaster and little else. Then, however, came the second wave. Most people's view on the second wave was much the same as the first, but Jenny was placed in a unique position- one of her best friends Awoke in the Second Wave.

She only spoke to her briefly over the phone, and the next day she found that her friend had died. Or, well, they assumed she had died, since a body was never found. Devastated, Jenny found herself astonished by the official narrative that these early generation mages were all unstable forces of destruction- after all, she had known one, and she had even spoken to one before her death. How dare they make these assumptions of innocent people?

Still, it took until the third wave for her feelings to truly harden. Early reports of the FOE and the third round of martial law struck at her sensibilities too much to ignore. The secrecy, the treating of mages like they were no longer people... All of it seemed so wrong, like a stifling of a unique and wonderful thing that had come into the world. Perhaps it was ludicrous of her to become so invested in magic whilst still a mundane, but she started to dig into the news about the Violet Wave and the people affected by it, sifting through the conspiracy theories and government sponsored coverup news in order to find the truth.

Slowly but surely, she began to uncover the few individuals brave, sane and clever enough to provide accurate and hard-hitting reporting. Journalists, both hard hitting reporters and mainstream sources that moved out of lockstep with what the government were saying, became a lifeline into a world she was prevented from learning about. She wanted to add her voice to this chorus, and her academic achievements were good enough to earn her a scholarship to Columbia as a media and communications major.

Skills and Weaknesses

Skills:

• Play Hard, Work Harder: Jenny's often been put down in sentences along with words like 'studious,' 'driven,' and 'motivated.' She has an excellent work ethic, and can keep herself slugging away at a task past the point where most people would have called it a day.
• Well-Read: Jenny is a font of general knowledge and esoteric titbits gained from reading through newspaper archives and listening to radio broadcasts. This allows her to have a firm, if very non-specific grounding in most subjects.
• Tech Savvy: Jenny is a media and communications major (or, was studying to be one, anyway) with aspirations to become a field journalist. She knows the ins and outs of laptops, cameras, phones both smart and dumb and many other common consumer electronics. Alas, anything mechanical escapes her however.

Weaknesses:

• Magical Fascination: The first Violet Dawn seized Jenny with delight and wonder, rather than fear and trepidation. To her, magic is a fantastical, wonderful thing. This, of course, can be a good thing, but the histories tell of mages losing themselves to their obsessions.
• Little Miss Sticks-Her-Nose In: Jenny can't help it; she just wants to know more. She'll pursue angles without very much tact or stick her schnozz in where it doesn't belong, just because she wants to hear more, learn more, know more about this new world she's been thrust into.
• Only A Lass: Jenny's 20 years old and has only spent two years away from home. As confident as any young adult is about forging a path for themselves, there's a lot of basic practical knowledge she lacks.

Spells:

• Playback (Black): As long as Jenny can remember it, she has the ability to pluck conversations and sounds out of her head and broadcast them as audio everyone can hear. Just like a real recording, it comes with background noise included, and lacks any visual functionalities.
• Feedback (Black): Jenny's premiere self-defence spell. When sufficiently scared or flooded with adrenaline, she can cause people to come under a series of effects most comparable to mic feedback; ringing ears, blurred vision and a heavy, 'cottony' taste in the mouth.
• Camera Trick (White): Jenny can project a visual manifestation, or, in simpler terms, an illusion. Currently she can't do anything bigger than a dog, and the lack of smell and structure will tip someone off should they witness it up close.
• Pick-Me-Up (Red): A handy little trick, a touch from Jenny can cause someone to draw on their internal energy reserves to provide them with a quick boost of alertness and awareness. Depending on the intensity requested, she can give someone the equivalent to a mild caffeine buzz or a serious shot of wakefulness, with a crash at the end equivalent to the intensity of the high. Because it draws on a person's own strength, those that are already tapped out will find it to be much less effective; possibly to the point of simply not working at all.
• Information Highway (Blue): By spending time with a device Jenny can pull any nonencrypted data from it. The more data she wants to pull, the more time it'll take, ranging from ten seconds for a surface level scan to an hour for a deep dive. As a side effect of this reading, any device she performs this on will be totally bricked, to the extent that not even a digital forensics team will be able to get anything from it.
• Interview Time (Black): Jenny can set up a 'link' between herself and one other individual that lasts for a very short period of time. Whilst this link is established neither her nor the linked individual can intentionally speak any falsehood, although they can decline to speak and they can give false information if they genuinely believe it to be the truth.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread

What are some games you actively have enjoyed but after you've beaten it once you have no desire to return to it despite liking it a great deal?

@TGM

Far Cry 4 and 5.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a sucker for a Far Cry game. FC2 and 3 are some of my favourite FPS of all time, and I can't say I didn't like 4&5 whilst playing them, but they're so benign, so average so... routine, that playing them again would be the video game equivalent of purgatory.

Metro 2033: Great game, loved the story, don't feel a desire to replay it. Actually, you know what? I'm just going to pre-empt myself and say MOST story driven single player FPS I will likely never play again in my life. Exceptions are games like Dishonoured, which is really more of a stealth game than an FPS. Moving on from these...

This War of Mine. A lot of the emotional beats lose all their punch seeing them again. Seeing a woman being dragged into a backroom to be sexually assulted by soldiers the first time is horrific, the second time I'm planning before I've entered the building to stab the soldiers and steal all their gear. Even on the harder difficulties, TWoM never challenged me skill-wise, so without the story, it's got nothing.

Phantom Doctrine: Really cool ideas, but it was too easy to optimise the fun out of the game, and not playing optimally meant more heat, more lost agents, more problems. Playing well was effectively a punishment. Learning to play well was real fun though.

Ghostrunner: Alright, sue me, technically speaking another FPS, I'd really group this into the Hotline Miami style of live fast, die fast, respawn fast. The new 'Hardcore' mode feels like banging your head against a brick wall, except once the brickwork begins to chip you realise there's a titanium layer underneath. The story is so bland, basic and barebones I'd figured it out before the third mission had ended, and the worldbuilding is interesting, but too shallow for me to care that much about it. As viscerally enjoyable as finishing a hard level was the first time, when all the game has to throw at you is 'more enemies positioned to kill you even more cheaply than before,' it's not worth it to me.

NEOTOKYO - Shadow Conflict [Open!]

"How are you going to prove anything if you don't use it?" She said to the retreating form of the man. Ah well. He had said he would talk later. She'd hold him to that, even as she turned towards the bearlike figure next to her.

Kaz hadn't noticed the other American at all, slipping right past her as if she no more substantial than smoke in the wind. Whoops. People sometimes got touchy about that sort of thing, best to address it quickly. "Hey Miss C. I'm doing alright, you?" There, problem solved.

Technically she probably should have been speaking with a little more deference since Caitlyn was kind of her boss, but Kaz was more or less tapped out of social awareness. Juggling two different conversations stretched the limits of patience, made it hard to focus on subtle cues. If Cait had a problem with her lack of subservient jargon then that was just too goddamn bad for the both of them.

"Have they been keeping you busy with ops?"

Keep it simple, ask innocuous questions that prompted the other person to ramble, that was the trick to making socialization bearable.

"No," Caitlyn said with a shake of her head. "The opposite, in fact. No DADs and I'm being kept out of the loop. Quite the opposite of busy. How about you though- doing anything on the side?"

"Not really. I usually stick around HQ, only really go out for cigarettes and things like that." She scuffed at the ground with her boot as she spoke, pacing herself as she always did when speaking. "I wish they'd send me out on something already. The waiting is by far the worst part of this job."

That wasn't true and Kaz knew it. There was always a cycle: spend time bored out of her skull while she waited for some raid to be organized, go out and get angry while the injection system pumped distilled hate through her heart, come home and curse her existence bitterly until it was time to start the whole thing over again. No part of the process got easier with repetition but she could at least anticipate them. No doubt she'd be mocking herself for wishing away the security of NSF headquarters the next time she was being shot at.

"Enjoy the quiet whilst you can. Doing things is good, but there was just a dirty bomb set off- I have a feeling that storms are on the horizon."

"I guess I better." Quiet, loud, whispers, screaming, what did it matter? This sort of job was unpleasant no matter the situation. Fighting a dirty war against rogue military elements could never be anything but unpleasant, the sort of job that was only done by idiots who bought into patriotism or idiots who were willing to kill for money.

"Guess we can hope that the next op will go smoother than the last."

"That's the only thing we can hope for really." Caitlyn knew when she wasn't wanted. "See you on the field Kaz." Reaching to take another drag, she found herself interrupted by another figure addressing her... And with Japanese honourifics to boot. "Please, C-Sama will do perfectly fine, if 'san' is too much for me." Caitlyn was struggling to put a name to a face as the woman addressed her, and failed even more as she switched to English.

"Begging your pardon, have we met before? You know my name but alas I'm unable to put one to you. My deepest apologies." Probably best to resort to the Japanese habit of extreme politeness in this case... And then, another voice. Asking about Shunsen. "I saw Mr. Takai pass through here earlier, yes," Caitlyn would respond, first in English, and then correcting herself to Japanese. All this switching between languages had her brain confused, but then came the mention of the woman who had addressed her first being new.

"Is that true? If so, welcome to the NSF, Tanaka... San? No, Kun?" Using these suffixes felt strange to her still.

A collab with @Smike Talking to @BCTheEntity and @Landaus Five-One

---

Yukiko moved into the range, a small presence among so many bigger, louder ones. Moving to her locker, she opened it up slowly and looked at the equipment laid out therein. An easy choice for now- some warming up with her revolver. Taking the loaders with her, she found her position, loaded her gun, and set the range distance to twenty metres. Keeping the revolver close to her body, she fired off three shots in rapid succession, watching as they punched solid holes into the centre of the paper target's mass. Pulling it forward, she replaced the target, set the distance again, and repeated the progress. Good. She still had her aim.

Something abut the man next to her stuck out though- she had seen his target bloom with damage, the rifle in his hands... But no barks from the gun itself. She swung the chamber out and let the empty casings tumble down onto the metal surface of the gallery, before placing her Mateba down and turning to the man next to her.

"Excuse me," She said with a quick bow. "That's a rather nice gun you have there. May I ask what it is, to make so little noise with its shots?"

Talking to @13Org

Warhammer 40k: Beyond the Pale - A Rogue Trader Adventure

"FOR COIN AND GLORY!"

Not the cry normally associated with Eldar, but Laeveyla was not the usual sort of Eldar. With her helmet donned on her head, the corsair saw the enemy in perfect clarity. Their slit-like noses, the thick goop covering their skins... And the splinter weapons and monomolecular wires in their hands. She swept her sabre through the air, eyes barely able to follow the hair-thin length, but she could see as the field of her weapon cleaved through the material, stopping it from slicing through her mesh. "Careful, halfblind. They're using monowires." She barked out her warning as she raised up her own gun and squeezed the trigger.

Eldar fusion pistols were a wonderful thing. The brief spool as energy was built up within the battery, the faint glow of sub-atomic particles as they left the end of the device, and then the horrifying sight of agitated molecules snap-evapourating. Armour, flesh and bone were gone in an instant, the foe she had been aiming at howling in agony and terror, just before her sabre came down and sliced through his chest, twirling him down and burying his face into the ground.

"A bullet through the stomach and a blade through the neck," sang-shouted the eldar as she twisted away from another shot returning fire with two pulses of what the Imperium so crudely called 'melta' blasts, "that's the way we swab the deck!" Two of their foes down, but there were still more in this corridoor alone.

"Come then, mayflies. Show me what you can do in a boarding action!"

Warhammer 40k: Beyond the Pale - A Rogue Trader Adventure

"Yes, well, I'm glad I don't intend to rely on your services, Scaredskin." She shook her head in the direction of the mangled heap of metal that stubbornly still called itself human, before a crewmember calling her a 'knife ear' came in. Honestly, there was no originality with these mon'keighs. Knife ears this, knife ears that. At least she tried coming up with new insults for them. "Issac," she said, referring to the man's name for quite possibly the first time since she had boarded this ship (even if it was the wrong name.)

Drawing her sabre in one smooth movement, she would swing it dangerously close to his face before bringing it back towards her with a flourish. "They are deadly to you, perhaps, but a Corsair ship would have already taken anything worth salvaging from their craft and sent it towards the nearest sun in the time it's taken for you lot to meander your way to this airlock. Considering it's putting holes in this bucket of bolts so rapidly, you'd think you lot might show some urgency."

Then came her favourite memebr of the crew to mock. The psyker. She thought herself so much better than the common man for her powers, not comprehending how little it raised her from the mediocre throngs of her race. "Oh come now. The machine can't even match my insult... That man," she gestured vaguely in Isiah's direction "uses the only damn insult any of you seem to know and you can't even be bothered to think of something? What does a woman have to do around here to match her wits?" She paused for a moment to let the comedic timing work its way out.

"Oh, yes, sorry, I forgot this was a mon'keigh ship, right, yes, my apologies." Turning back to the psyker, she would toss her power sabre up and behind her, gracefully catching the weapon with her other hand, giving it a twirl, and then sheathing it once more, resting both of her hands atop the hilt. "One doesn't exactly have to rare to get ahead of you lot. I don't call you lumberfoots for nothing, after all." She rolled her eyes, but then in a surprising example of what little modesty the corsair had in her, doffed her cap towards the choir-master once she felt her magics work their way across the eldar's form.

"Now then, I believe that leaves us awaiting one more, and then we can be off and I can earn my rather large paycheck."

NEOTOKYO - Shadow Conflict [Open!]

The crackle of a coil. The smell of menthol and berries curled out from the woman's mouth, the vapours picked up and carried away into the air. Caitlyn was... Displeased was the right word to put it. From departmental director to squad supervisor. It was a step down and make no mistake, with the only compensation being that she was still earning the same amount as she had been back in the USA for a lot less work. Some might have taken the chance to have a bit of an R&R session; use the free time to do something new and creative, but the FBI agent had found the idea of that somewhat galling. She was more experienced than this. She knew she could be helpful, but the bosses in the NSF were paranoid beyond any reasonable level, even for a clandestine governmental department.

A figure moved through the oppressive atmosphere. Takai Shunsen. She had only really clocked him initially because he had come from Okinawa; usually the southerners were a bit more familiar with people from the US, but he was a junior agent and he had never ended up underneath her. Then the bomb had gone off and everything had gone to hell in a handbasket for a while. She was mildly surprised to see him alive, but that wasn't a bad thing- beating the odds was never something to condemn.

That being said, she noticed something different. As he approached, she'd let the vape slip from her lips, turning to address the younger man. "New chrome." She said, without much emotion put into the statement. "I hope physio hasn't been too bad. I know what the docs put you through." Her being a cyborg was well-known, and she could empathise with the man. Something of her younger, stupider self was in him right now; the self that had been lost along with two limbs. "If you want to talk about it, or want some advice on how you can make them run better, my door is open. I've not been busy what with no DADs going on." Her Japanese was workmanlike. It wasn't pretty or flowery and she certainly had one hell of an accent, but she could be understood by and understand others. It did its job.

Then, the man passed, like the smoke from a cigarette into the smog, and she would place the mouthpiece to her lips once more, drawing in the flavoured nicotine and holding it in her lungs, staring out at the city. Had she been more impatient, she would have wished for something more to do, but she knew that life had a way of pitching fastballs at you right after a lull in activity; she'd enjoy the slow times before a DAD went wrong and she was being dragged through the mud for being a foreign agent. Then, as if to give her a little taste, the lumbering form of Kaz would come into view. You could have put her on the Bear Flag and nobody would be able to tell a difference... Well, that was unfair. The bear was less liable to tear you to pieces. Maybe a bit hairier too.

"How goes it?" she would say in English. Even in Tokyo, it was a crapshoot if any Japanese people would understand you- even before 2012 they'd been somewhat insular with language, but the rising tide of nationalism had rendered a lot of people either too caught up or too afraid to speak the language if they didn't obviously look like a foreigner.

@LetMeDoStuff@Smike

---

Yukiko was having a late lunch. She sat deep in her regular ramen bar, a steaming bowl of food in front of her, and felt a certain level of concern. Her funds would not last her forever. She needed work, but she had an exclusive contract with the NSF that would leave her liable to more trouble than she wanted to get into if she started doing 'extracurricular' work without approval. She could sever the contract, but the NSF could prove to be a lucrative source of income if she held out for just a bit longer. It was a difficult, frustrating path that lay ahead of her.

Perhaps she'd just have to tighten her belt and cross her fingers. Surely, they would be returning to regular functions, and she'd be getting more than the stipend she was currently receiving- the stipend that was barely above the poverty line. She had been good for rent for two years by now, but it only took two months of missed payments before her landlord would start to kick her out, so she didn't have the luxury of just being able to coast on by like some might.

Standing from her seat, she topped her glass up again from the soda dispenser and grunted, frustrated. Money problems aside, there was also the fact that she was goddamn bored. She had been sitting on her rear, twiddling her thumbs and generally feeling useless. She didn't exactly take pleasure in killing people, it was merely another aspect of her job, but damn if she didn't prefer it to doing absolutely nothing. The noodles went down, as delicious as they always were, but her mouth moved mechanically, her tongue numb to the flavour.

Maybe she'd go to the range. At the very least, it couldn't hurt.

Warhammer 40k: Beyond the Pale - A Rogue Trader Adventure

Assault Point 10/15 had a member there almost immediately. Lounging against one of the walls, a xenos helmet beneath one of her feet and a fusion pistol in her hand. "Lumberfoots," she would address individuals as they filtered in, making an explicit adaptation for the techpriest, choirmaster and, should he arrive, her employer. The first received a 'skinscared,' the second, a highly sarcastic 'highmind,' and the third a curt nod, rather than an offensive nickname. "I hope all of yous are prepared for this. I warn you, should any of you mayflies go down, I'm not risking my millenia to help your decades." She turned towards Rudyard. "You're centuries, so you I will stop for though."