Turns out Cee wasn’t the only one with some persistence to her abilities.
The flecks of light Juniortron was throwing off began to resolve into golden spears, hovering near him as they multiplied, building up into what promised to be quite a visually spectacular volley as light flashed and glittered off of them. Within the chaotic concealment of her Red Moon Cloak, Cee quirked one eyebrow up as she regarded the building attack. Golden Boy up there sure as hell knew how to play to whatever intangible crowd he was trying to impress, but the long build-up to his attack gave Cee plenty of time to plan her counterstroke.
The spears started to rain down, arrowing in with excellent aim at where Cee would have been had she continued her cruise at a steady velocity and vector, blanketing the area around the target point as well, attempting to strike her from the sky in a storm of golden needles. Whether Juniortron had chosen a wide-area attack because he couldn’t properly target her through her Cloak or as a measure to try and limit her evasive capabilities didn’t really matter – the Agent was well prepared indeed for this sort of assault.
The heavy revolver in her left hand, already aligned with the mechanoid and thus also aligned with the axis of the spears’ travel, spat four of its preloaded rounds out from within the clawing, mind-twisting fog of the Red Moon Cloak. They were not, however, aimed for Juniortron. Not this time. This time, the rounds were Pompeii-B* shots – basic variations of Cee’s typical nuclear graser strike, which Juniortron had been thoroughly introduced to by now. These ones, though, did not produce a focused bolt of coherent gamma – the Pompeii-B variation omitted the one-shot magnetic lensing in favor of a larger payload.
They were, in effect, regular explosive bullets whose payloads simply happened to be nuclear rather than chemical in nature.
The micronuclear detonations were still significantly more powerful than any conventional explosive round could be, though. The four Pompeii-B rounds Cee had fired were aimed precisely, detonating amidst the descending spear-storm and heavily disrupting the attack. Nuclear airbursts shattered a portion of the descending spears above Cee, within the outer edges of the Red Moon Cloak’s influence. She moved through the resulting dead zones within the maddening concealment of her Cloak, the meticulously aimed holes in the spears’ coverage providing her plenty of room to evade. Only a scant few of the golden spears threatened Cee at all, and those were easily enough dealt with via the interposed face of her Bastion.
She deflected away those handful of vague threats and dismissed the remaining pair of Pompeii-B rounds in her cylinder, watching as the mechanoid dove down amidst his spears and bored his way into the Glorious Venture. Clearly he had plans for the derelict ship, though what he was going to do with an ancient, rusted-out hulk possessed of virtually no working electronics, engines corroded into eternal uselessness, no fuel reserves, and a hull severely compromised by the passage of time, Cee could not be assed to guess.
Nor did she care. What she did know was that as mildly amusing as it had been to explore the old wreck, the Glorious Venture’s days on this benighted old world had come to an end. Whatever Juniortron was doing, he’d made a serious tactical error in entering the ancient ship. Inside the Venture his superior aerial mobility was nullified…and he was a more-or-less stationary target.
Cee shortened her flight arc, quickly positioning herself about a hundred meters in front of the ship’s bow, aligned with the vessel’s spine, Gunsmoke held up in front of her. The heavy shrouding above the weapon’s low-mounted barrel sparked, then blew off, panels flying back behind Cee to reveal a small cylinder, roughly half the length of the gun’s barrel, suspended between a pair of tiny magnetic anchors. The cylinder was black – but not the jet black of a coat of paint or electrical tape. Within the deep, inky blackness of the cell, an entire galaxy looked to be hidden within the shifting liquid motions within the slowly rotating cell.
Well…’slowly’ at the very first. As soon as the device was revealed, its spin began to drastically accelerate, energy flooding through the magnetic linkages. A deep, reverberating whine began to sound, shaking dust and rust from the Glorious Venture’s hull. Crackling arcs of errant energy coursed from the gun over Cee’s left arm as the weapon began to transform, and Cee’s arm with it. Gunsmoke’s barrel elongated, thickening heavily at the base, while spiraled, claw-like rails extended the weapon’s rifling beyond its bore. The revolver’s grip expanded, merging with Cee’s fingers as the entire weapon shifted to a uniform, ash-like grey. Scales of that same ashen grey traveled up Cee’s left arm, engulfing the entire limb. Feather-like structures unfurled from the ashen scales; a cluster of them around Cee’s shoulder, a smaller cluster around her wrist, a handful strewn randomly around the rest of her arm. Finally, the elongated barrel split, six arcs of metal creating a spiral cage around a howling, barely-tamed newborn star.
The Angel’s Arm* was the most basic application of the power of the ancient, artificial Angel locked away within the old gun’s power cell. Legends of the world from which the weapon took its name spoke of destructive power unrivaled by any other weapon – blasts capable of putting craters in the moon overhead, attacks whose mere backwash was enough to devastate entire cities. Cee’s Angel’s Arm was not so powerful as all that – even Gene’s intervention back on Vestusio could not change the fact that Cee was not Gunsmoke’s original, long-lost intended wielder – but it was certainly powerful enough to blast effortlessly through an old, rusted-out tomb of a vessel.
Which was exactly what Cee needed.
A mental twist of her currently-phantasmal left trigger finger unleashed the Angel’s Arm, heralding the final death of the Glorious Venture. A column of sheer destructive power over five meters in diameter erupted from the Angel’s Arm’s barrel like a horizontal volcano, crashing through the corroded civilian-grade hull and time-worn interior structure of the aged ship with all the force of a cannon through cobwebs. The barely-diminished cannon bolt tore through the engines at the rear of the ship and continued on, brilliant white light etching sharp-edged shadows across the wastelands of Tarkarus as the all-consuming beam burned, eventually spending its fury on digging a map-altering crater out of the side of a distant mountain.
Within the Venture, backwash from the Angel’s Arm blast raced throughout the ship’s corridors and maintenance runs, destructive energy diffusing in a hellish web all through the ancient vessel. Juniortron had almost certainly avoided the Angel’s Arm’s primary blast – though if he hadn’t, it was unlikely there’d be more than a few bits of charcoal left of him. Nevertheless, Cee hadn’t been counting on catching the alien mechanoid with the Angel’s Arm directly. No, that was too optimistic. What she was doing was, in some ways, crueler. The scouring devastation released inside the Glorious Venture by the Angel’s Arm attack wiped away what little structural support the old ship had left. If Juniortron was able to avoid the Arm’s backwash, violent surges of energy crashing through the vessel in chaotic, impossible to predict patterns…
Well. Then he’d have to deal with the half-molten wreckage of the Glorious Venture collapsing in on him in the wake of the Angel’s Arm attack. Cored like an apple, there was no way for the historic colony ship to even begin to support its own weight. With a tremendous grating rumbling roar, the ship fell in on itself, collapsing into a jagged, unlivable tangle of worthless wreckage.
Ideally with Juniortron at the bottom, cursing his gorgeous and infinitely talented victorious assailant’s name with his final few processor cycles, but that remained to be seen. Cee grimaced faintly as the Angel’s Arm receded in the wake of the cannon shot. Her arm returned to normal, as did Gunsmoke, complete with new cowling over the Angel’s reactor. The weapon smoked and steamed – fortunately, Gene had been able to remodel it such that it no longer destroyed itself whenever Cee invoked the Angel, but ‘not completely ruined’ didn’t necessarily mean ‘in prime shape’. The Agent slapped the revolver back into its holster as she took off towards the wreckage of the newly destroyed Glorious Venture, cruising around it in a wary ellipse, looking for signs of evil killbot activity.
She kept her shield squarely between her and the wreck, fingers of her now-empty left hand held slightly splayed, ready to snatch any of a dozen different Godforged armaments out of the aether at the first sign of resumed hostilities. Even without a discrete weapon, however, Cee still had the building charge in her Lament. The unearthly din of the Venture’s collapse had drowned it out for a time, but the seething spark of built-up power in the Lament had grown dense enough to start humming as well. A sharp keen, tearing at the winds around Cee, growing more and more audible as the wrecked Venture settled and as power continued to flow into the spark through the web of lightning suspending it in her Halo, the weapon’s howling song growing louder all the while.
If Juniortron showed what passed for his face outside the new-made scrap heap, Cee was pretty thoroughly prepared to separate it from its general existence.
*
-Pompeii-B: Simple brute-force rounds, derived from the Pompeii nuclear graser system. Pompeii-B shells omit the magnetic lensing microsystems engineered into normal Pompeii rounds, replacing them with a slightly larger and more damaging micronuclear spark igniter. As such, Pompeii rounds create an ordinary (for a given definition of ‘ordinary’) nuclear explosion at their point of detonation, if a very small one by the standards of nukes. One of Cee’s quicker and more useful area-effect techniques, if one with a very strictly observed minimum range.
-Angel’s Arm: Cee’s Gunsmoke-G is a relic of an ancient hero, recovered by the Yggdrasil Crew and…appropriated…by the android when she raided their armory for gear after they woke her up. Gunsmoke’s only special property, beyond the unusually rugged construction that allows it to withstand usage by Cee, is playing host to the Angel, an artificially created demigod-like creature capable of producing an enormous amount of energy and, to a limited extent, matter-energy conversion. While the Angel’s power is immense, the entity is difficult to rouse from its sleep; Cee can only wake the Angel up once in a given encounter, after which it falls into a deep slumber and cannot be awakened again for a minimum of several days. As such, the Angel’s Arm is useful as an Instant Snapshot Doomcannon, but is effectively a one-shot weapon.
It's not a problem. I figure Virtuoso is intelligent enough to lead a moving target, and it's a big AoE attack anyways. Easy enough to account for the shift in central aimpoint, eh?
Heh...there's two sorts of mistakes that happen in roleplaying. The one is honest errors of interpretation, which should mostly just be waved off and dealt with. No harm meant, no reason to be a prick about it. I know what you meant to do, and will deal with the strike as it was intended to be fired.
The other is tactical errors, which should be exploited as mercilessly as a given character is capable of. We'll see if jumping into the Venture was a tactical error on Virtuoso's part in the next couple of posts, methinks :p
All right, getting to work on a reply for this now. Sorry - the mortgage company refuses to stop threatening to wreck my life for no good reason, and that damned appraiser isn't helping.
Anyways. I'm mentioning this ahead of time - Virtuoso seems to've mistaken Cee's positioning/movement for the initial spear-storm attack. Cee hasn't had her feet on the ground for, like, the last forever, and she's also been steadily moving, rather than standing still. My apologies if the movement hasn't been clearly enough written out - she's been flying in a relatively low-altitude circle, five hundred meter radius from Virtuoso, for the last fewish turns now. I can adjust for the targeting on the spears, have them come at where she was/was going the way they were obviously intended to, but I wanted to clear up the positioning issue since it may've become a Thing otherwise.
@LeeRoy FINALLY. Okay. Got a reply up. It's not really great, but it's there. Lemme know if anything's confusing you - the Red Moon Cloak is one of those moves that's really hard to properly describe, I've never quite found the right words to get it across the first time.
To all appearances, the Sisterplosion had done its job and caught Juniortron off his guard. The alien robot-man was briefly sent tumbling, wisps of smoke-like light leaking from increased damage to his front torso plating. As it turned out, however, Cee was not the only synthetic being on the field this time. The agile mechanoid ice-danced his way around the snap-fired Pompeii shots Cee had sent winging his way, demonstrating both the same resilience of brain Cee had so often won fights with and much the same exquisite control of his full-body engine system as she demonstrated with her Halo. A slight frown creased her features for a moment – while the full-body engine likely took up significantly more processing load than her own Halo and was obviously more vulnerable to damage or disruption, it was likely that this target was even more agile in the sky than she was when all his shit was working. An advantage Cee was not used to being on the losing side of, and yet more reason to be thoroughly irritated with the mechanoid.
Who proceeded to use that full-body engine to whip up a minor cyclone, using it and heavy boosts downward to rocket himself quickly up into the sky. Cee angled herself upwards to keep her shield between herself and her foe, her frown deepening ever-so-slightly. Any aerial fighter instinctively knew that altitude was as much of a weapon as actual weapons; “high sky” was as important in an aerial contest as high ground was in a dirt fight. Neither combatant was one liable to be significantly hindered by attacking out of the sun – though Cee’d love to see Juniortron try it, and receive the painful lesson it’d earn him of Cee’s own capabilities – but the advantages of superior altitude were still there.
Juniortron clearly knew it, hanging there in midair with shards of his wings flaking off into the sky around him, posing like something out of an action movie. She was tempted to put the built-up charge of her Lament through the manbot then and there, but she knew better – the mechanoid’s seeming tranquility was no such thing. Whether he came down behind a giant palm strike, attempted to crash into her surrounded by a meteor corona, or did something else altogether, Juniortron was preparing a strike, not idling while he defragmented or whatever. It wasn’t the right time for the Lament.
Given the five hundred-ish meter distance she’d maintained from Juniortron when they were level with each other and his rapid ascent, the mechanoid was close to seven hundred meters away from Cee by now. Enough to rule out most shorter-ranged techniques or weapons, though Cee didn’t figure that situation would last long. She could throw out a few more pokes, try and score some additional dings, but the odds weren’t good that anything she tossed out naked like that would be more than a waste of time and energy.
Instead, she continued her circling cruise, maintaining her altitude and keeping both shield and revolver in position. She ‘Forged a new set of loads for Gunsmoke while Juniortron was waiting for an eagle to jump off of, but did not fire any of them. They were instead held in reserve against a few of Juniortron’s likely plan, Gunsmoke held unerringly in line with the mechanoid while she decided to try a different tack. Rather than waste time on more pokes, Cee bent her efforts to donning her Red Moon Cloak.
The Red Moon Cloak was not actually a physical garment, but was instead an artificial aura wreathing Cee and an expanding area of space around her, within which the perception of those around Cee was twisted. Based on a madness-inducing technique she had studied from the Einst bloodline’s unusual abilities, the Red Moon Cloak diffused external viewers’ awareness of Cee’s presence, causing her to look, sound, smell, and/or ‘feel’, if one had ephemeral or ethereal senses (or technological sensors, in this case), as if she was occupying every single point in the space influenced by her Cloak that she possibly could, all at once. The tableau wasn’t physically possible – there wasn’t so much a seething, Lovecraftian blob- mass of Cee bits as there was the simple, yet utterly contradictory knowledge that the one, singular Cee Juniortron was facing happened to be occupying more than one point in space in a manner which violated basic physics.
Figuring out where Cee herself was within the Cloak’s influence was impossible for most individuals; organics found it extremely difficult to focus on the Cloak in the first place, swiftly developing nasty headaches and overwhelming urges to look away as their brains tried to cope with the inconsistencies and impossibilities the Red Moon Cloak presented them. Synthetics fared either better or significantly worse; some machines simply rejected the nonsensical data as an obvious anomaly or ran system checks to verify their inputs were functional, while others damn near fried themselves trying to compute their way through the chaotic interference.
Juniortron was not likely the sort of low-class robot that’d burn himself out trying to logic his way around the screaming illogicality of the Red Moon Cloak…but unless he was somehow able to pierce or negate the Cloak completely, at the very least his aim would be thrown quite badly off by the thousands of places his senses would be telling him his foe was. It put Juniortron in something of a pickle – any wide-area attack meant to saturate the rough sphere of space under the protection of the Red Moon Cloak would likely be too weak to effectively break through Autochthon’s Bastion, while singular heavy blows meant to try and strike the Agent through her shield, or deal damage despite the barrier’s intervention, would be simplicity itself to evade when aimed blind at the cloud-of-potential-Cee that was all most foes could discern through the Cloak.
Whether Juniortron shotgunned and was blocked, sniped and missed, or wasted time trying to decide on a different plan altogether, it gave Cee more time to build her offense and read her foe. His reaction to her Red Moon Cloak would be quite telling of his sensory capabilities and probably another good clue to his offensive abilities, and any delay the Cloak earned her would mean more power channeled to the brilliant sunspark growing in her Halo. More power the gold-wreathed robot-man would eventually have to eat.
Cee could only hope he was sufficiently hungry to warrant the meal.
@leeroy You would not believe the week I've had so far. Like, actually - if I described everything that's happened to me, you'd tell me I was inventing disasters to avoid having to post. The main Sword of Damocles that's been hanging over me for a month is finally* resolved though...so provided my home Internet comes back online sometime before the zombies rise, I'll make getting something done here a priority. Until then...All I can say is 'q_q'
@LeeRoy I'm here. Be aware that life is kicking me in the face pretty hard recently; both time and desire to write have been scarce. I will attempt to respond as quickly as is reasonable, but it may be some time. Apologies in advance.
Wind is simple enough to balance the same way everything-else kinesis/mancy can be balanced. If the character is spending little effort to move air, then the amount of air they're moving isn't really sufficient to do much. Air does have mass, but it's the least massive classical element out there by several orders of magnitude. It takes a lot of g'damned air to match the inertia of something like a geokinetically-propelled boulder, or a chemically-propelled bit of metal. Or a body. The aerokinetimancer has to move the same weight of air as anyone else to have the same impact, and even then the force of his strikes are diffused across, generally, a huge area. He'd need space and warning to be able to move enough air long enough to destabilize bullet flight paths, and heavier or guided projectiles would be commensurately more difficult for the aerokinetimancer to stop.
This is, of course, assuming "control of air motion", and not stuff like hardened-air shields, blades of stiffened wind, or other stuff. At that point you're basically dealing with a funky telekinetic and need to approach both balancing and the fight completely differently, but hey. That's where the fun part is!
@LeeRoy A'ight, post is up. Again, apologies for the delay. Work has been vicious the last few weeks (and today), and the whole house-buying thing keeps throwing me random curveballs. FInding the right time and mood to write has been...challenging.