The Luchalliance has six fighters currently preparing for deployment to the ring. Some have poked their heads in here already, some have not. The Code of Glorious Conduct will be upheld. Fans will scream. There will be music and pyrotechnics. Suplexes will happen. And Goat's hair will be eaten.
And he was looking for some souls to steal. He was in a bind, because the Zone was way behind, and he was willing to make a deal. When he come across this young boy practicin' with his friends and keepin' it hot, and ol 'Moe jumps up on a ring post and says; "Boy let me tell you what. Guess you didn't know it, but we're wrestlers too, and if you care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you. You put on a pretty good match son but give the Zone its due, I'll bet a mask of gold against your souls, I think we're better than you."
Boy said, "My name's Yurei, and it might be a sin, but I'll take your bet and you're gonna regret, cuz' we're the best there's ever been..."
And then it was on.
The Luchalliance accepts your call, Mobius. Profiles currently in development. 3+ fighters currently assembling (hopefully) tournament-legal sheets. You'd best get that mask of gold ready, boy - the Devil may be dealing the cards, but we're ready to flip the tables on ya.
Gotcha. Heh...well, we'll call it even for the fact that the Pompeii warheads are not actually detonating anywhere near Virtuoso and were attacking him with long-range graser shots. Eithaway, suppose the intent works out in either case. My apologies if my writing was confusing again; I'm not used to how this place operates.
Sorry for the delay. Ended up sitting on this one a few days - it's so very, very Cee, but it's also something I could easily imagine being contentious. Couldn't figure out anything better to do, however, so...here we go. Let's see what happens, shall we?
Juniortron’s response to the Fangs of Nidhoggr, and Cee’s semi-concealed approach to his position…was to start blasting out more golden javelins, hurling them around in an attempt to interdict her Fangs while he stood there behind his barrier and continued to do nothing. The Pompeii graser warheads, bursting beyond the effective intercept radius of a bunch of dumbfired, unguided inert barbequeue skewers, spent their fury against the mechanoid’s hazy barricade. Whether the barrier would last for any amount of time against dozens of repeated graser strikes was up for debate, but Cee didn’t really think the shield would hold too much longer without help. The Superbubbles plowed through the spear-storm, carrying Pompeii-B micronuke bursting missiles with them beyond the shoddy defense, while Migraine electronic warfare systems howled and Stardazzlers let off their disruptive thunderclaps. All matched…against a bunch of tawdry lawn darts hurled vaguely in the direction of the missile strike and vaguely in the direction of her Cloaked self. It was only through nigh-impossible luck that the random shotgunning of skewers held off Cee’s Fangs for any length of time at all, really.
That luck wouldn’t hold, though.
Cee’s scowl of irritation deepened into outright anger; she ceased her ground-hugging, defensive approach to Juniortron and erupted skyward, rocketing straight up. In the process, she cut her Red Moon Cloak, revealing her precise position for the first time in what felt like ages, and remixed her Fangs. She cut the minimally effective Stardazzlers down to one warhead in a hundred, keeping the final shot simply to keep the mechanoid honest, and reduced her Migraine EW warheads to four shots in a hundred. The Superbubble and Pompeii-B micronuke burst counts remained the same, while all of the production cut out from the Stardazzlers and Migraines were thrown into a heavy reinforcement of the Pompeii nuclear grasers.
A mental twist-and-click widened the Fangs’ attack vector radius, enabling the missiles to swing wide, wide out to the sides, above and below. The Pompeii grasers were especially dangerous – attacking in what amounted to half of a wide-area sphere centered on Cee, well outside the interception range of the lawn darts, they would continue to spit long-range bolts of coherent gamma at Juniortron while his little skewers wasted themselves on a thickened shell of Superbubbles and Pompeii-Bs threatening the killbot from his front. Within a few breaths, Juniortron was facing attacks from well over a sixty-degree angle in his front facing arc – nothing that could be stopped by any amount of lucky lawn darts.
Cee, meanwhile, crossed her arms over her chest as she came level with Juniortron’s altitude, deliberately and visibly reducing the defensive benefits of her shield as she glared across the intervening space at the mechanoid. Micronuke explosions, short-lived barrier bubbles, and Cee’s own distance and projectile tracking abilities enabled her to avoid any impacts from the lawn darts with little shifts in her position and the occasional savage, dart-intercepting steel-toed kick.
“Are you done?” she barked, revealing why she’d cut the disorienting madness of her Cloak as she started castigating her foe. “Are you through playing? Here I was thinking this was a fight, but you haven’t thrown a proper punch yet, and this is just a sad joke!” she snapped, waving her left hand at the stream of darts before returning it to its previous imperious pose.
“I can sit here all fucking day and huck missiles until it works, you know!” the Agent barked. “Or I can work on some fucking BIGGER ONES!” she roared. And sure enough, behind her the outlines of a pair of significantly larger missiles began to form, drawing themselves in midair in sparks and lines of glowing golden light. Just over three meters in total length from tip to fins, if the slowly-forming schematic-like outlines of the weapons were to be believed. Given the draw on both her secondary processing systems and her Godforge that the Fangs inflicted, the so-called Bigger Missiles formed themselves with what was, to Cee, agonizing slowness…but that was in this singular instance the point.
“These are five-kiloton max yield tactical warheads, with integrated Superbubble projectors to counteract point defense!” Cee bellowed to her theoretical opponent. “You have until I’m done ‘Forging them to do something worth my fucking time or I’m going to shove one of them down your nonexistent throat, the other up your nonexistent ass, and make sure the [i]rest[/] of you ends up nonexistent, too!”
The Bigger Missiles took up most of the rest of Cee’s discretionary budget in terms of processing resources and Godforge time. As well, the additional materials created required her to step down her Lament’s charging cycle to a mere trickle, barely enough to keep the already-built charge stable. Not that it mattered much – there was already enough power built up in the Lament to core through most smaller starships lengthwise. There was the usual Panic Reserve of both processing and Godforge capacity that Cee left untouched in any given fight for sudden defensive requirements…but realistically, she was pretty much tapped out creating her plethora of warheads.
Which was exactly the point – she was leaving herself as open as she’d ever been since the ‘battle’ commenced, inviting Juniortron to take advantage of her stationary position, chatter, lax stance, and obvious preoccupation whilst simultaneously pressuring his weak defenses with a widespread, wide-area resurgence of the Fangs and putting him on a nuclear clock.
It was essentially the same thing she’d tried to do with the Fangs, save explicitly stated and writ very much large – provoke the evil killbot into trying to break the so-called stalemate between them and show her something resembling a good time. If he continued to stay on the defensive and avoid confrontation…well, she’d either nuke him into dust and find something else to occupy herself with, or she’d get really mad.
End-of-Turn Status
Current Status: Title In Effect: Pirate Queen System Integrity: 100% Entropic Order: 0% Penalty Combat Status: Engaged – All Green
Sinner’s Lament: Active, Charging (ALERT: 95% reduction in charge speed in effect) Fangs of Nidhoggr: Active (45% Pompeii, 25% Pompeii-B, 25% Superbubble, 4% Migraine EW, 1% Stardazzler) Bigger Missiles: 25% complete
Ether Field: Green Ether Stream: Green
Gunsmoke: Yellow A. Bastion: Green A. Adjudicator: Green Phantasm: Green
New Stuff Breakdown
Bigger Missiles: Pretty much exactly what they sound like. Small* tactical-range weapons which are, nonetheless, full-up ‘reset the battlefield’ nuclear armaments. Equipped with integrated EW and Superbubble systems to defend themselves against enemy interception systems on the way to their target. Five-kiloton maximum yield, though the weapons can be stepped down if less raw devastation is required. For incredibly obvious reasons, the missiles also have a very significant minimum safe operating distance
@LeeRoy A'ight, got Cee's reply up. Definite escalation, but hey - there's only so much fun to be derived from trading potshots. Let's see Virtuoso kick it up a step or two here, have some REAL fun.
Also: adding an End-Of-Turn status section to the posts to detail what Cee's doing in a more comprehensible format. Hopefully it's unnecessary because the post itself should make it plain, but she's got a number of toggles up right now and things have slipped through the cracks before. Lemme know if you like those or want me to axe them.
Juniortron had, somehow, managed to escape both the flooding backwash of the Angel’s Arm attack and the subsequent collapse of the Glorious Venture without damage. At least, physical damage – though he’d managed to erupt from the ship anew mere (metaphorical) heartbeats before its collapse, he’d turned to stare at Cee and shut down his showy Robo-Jesus aura, seemingly paralyzed by the catastrophe he’d narrowly avoided as he made no attempt to initiate a new offense. He simply stared at Cee, watching her in her defensive cruise around the wreckage of the old colony ship.
Or where he thought she was, at least. The sense-twisting madness of Cee’s Red Moon Cloak was still in effect, as Juniortron had taken no action to attempt to pierce or dispel it, nor given Cee reason to believe it was ineffective. The reverberating hum of her building Lament charge was audible even through the Cloak, though its source was as distorted and nigh-impossible to pinpoint as every other bit of Cee was. Her shield was up, her Field was charged, her Cloak was undisturbed, she was as yet undamaged, and her enemy was just sitting there staring at her rather than trying to end her.
The corners of Cee’s lips turned down in a fiercely disapproving scowl. She was beginning to think that Mister Robo Jesus here wasn’t taking her seriously.
Nevertheless, they were right back where they’d started, for the most part – a few hundred meters of nothing but open sky between them. Cee could hurl artillery all day long and waste most of it on Juniortron’s agility, while the alien mechanoid had not yet displayed anything that stood a reasonable chance of getting past her Bastion in a ranged duel. She could probably chip him to death over the course of several hours…but now she was too irritated to do that. Now she was going to beat this asshole’s non-face right off his skull tube.
Behind Cee, weapons started forming. Roughly as long as her forearm, each device looked a bit like a toy rocket – about the size of a short poster tube, with a single engine nozzle at its base, a spiked tip at its top, and an array of steering fins at either end. As soon as each device finished forming, its engine ignited and it streaked away, curving around to orient on Juniortron from a myriad of different angles and directions. The missiles were swift indeed, though not invincibly so, nor was their tracking particularly tight or infallible – though the weapons would certainly strike an unmoving enemy, it was possible, even likely, that Juniortron would evade incoming warheads, or shoot them down as they approached.
That didn’t matter. It didn’t matter for two primary reasons. One was that the missiles did not all carry identical payloads. Some turned out to be flash warheads, detonating in the space around Juniortron in brilliant, gouging bursts of ether-rich light and booming thunderclaps of noise. Those Stardazzler* warheads were intended to assault conventional senses and render their targets blind and deaf. Some warheads turned out to be EW platforms, generating phantom electronic signatures of missiles that didn’t otherwise exist and letting off intense bursts of electronic noise. These Migraine* payloads were electronic equivalents of the Stardazzlers, meant to fox synthetic detection systems and camouflage the approach of damaging warheads.
Some of the missiles carried Superbubble* payloads, able to briefly generate a spherical barrier encompassing themselves and a handful of other missiles, interdicting enemy interception systems and deflecting any shots they didn’t outright block away from the missiles they protected. Some of the missiles carried remote-delivered Pompeii graser shots, striking at unpredictable times from unpredictable angles with bolts of coherent gamma radiation from well beyond the range most expected missiles to threaten them at.
Any missile that wasn’t one of those things was a ‘simple’ micronuclear payload, delivered in the same manner that missiles had been delivering explosive payloads since the beginnings of recorded time.
The second reason why Juniortron’s defensive measures didn’t really matter was that the missiles did not stop forming and firing.
The Fangs of Nidhoggr* was not so much a singular, one-and-done technique as it was a continuous sub-process, initiated by Cee and then left to percolate in her secondary systems until such time as she shut the ‘technique’ down. So long as she desired them to, the Fangs would form behind her and fly towards her foe on randomized tracks, each missile armed with a different type of warhead, surrounding Juniortron in chaos and devastation. With the Red Moon Cloak still in effect, the mechanoid would be unable to trace the origin point of the missiles – they would simply arrow out of the cloud of existential chaos surrounding Cee and orient in on him from a huge number of different vectors.
Activating the Fangs did require Cee to step down the supply of power to her Lament, causing the weapon to build up additional charge more slowly, and running a pseudo-automated process such as this one meant tying up most f her secondary processing power and causing her Godforge respond slowly to other needs until she terminated the Fangs…but until then, Cee’s secondary combat systems would fling missiles at Juniortron nonstop while Cee herself focused on other tasks.
Such as dropping down next to the slagged wreckage of the Glorious Venture, hugging the wreckage for cover as she started arrowing towards Juniortron’s position, keeping close to both the wreck and the ground in order to use the ravaged vessel as a shield. Within the befuddling concealment of her Red Moon Cloak, Cee and her rolling artillery storm were impossible to pinpoint for direct counterattack as she approached. Indirect or area attacks, such as a reprise of the spear storm, would be badly impeded by the interposed bulk of the wrecked Glorious Venture – assuming Juniortron could stay unexploded long enough to throw such attacks in the face of the Fangs of Nidhoggr’s continuous assault of grasers, explosions, and intensely disorienting bursts of ECM and sensory overloads.
No more pussyfooting around with null-effort pistol potshots and exploratory strikes. It was time to take this planet-cracking jackass to pieces.
End-of-Turn Status
Current Status: Title In Effect: Pirate Queen System Integrity: 100% Entropic Order: 0% Penalty Combat Status: Engaged – All Green
Red Moon Cloak: Active Fangs of Nidhoggr: Active (s. processing 65% tasked, Godforge 60% tasked) Sinner’s Lament: Active, Charging (ALERT: 70% reduction in charge speed in effect)
Ether Field: Green Ether Stream: Green
Gunsmoke: Yellow A. Bastion: Green A. Adjudicator: Green Phantasm: Green
New Stuff Breakdown
Fangs of Nidhoggr: An area control and denial ability created by Cee to assist in combating enemies which hugely outnumbered her, or enemies resistant to singular, focused attacks. Designed to run in Cee’s secondary processing systems once initiated rather than requiring her direct focus and attention, the Fangs commandeer most of Cee’s Godforge in order to continually create, target, and fire a constant stream of mini-missiles at enemies. Cee can vary the overall mix of payloads in any given instance of the Fangs’ operation, and is able to arm the missiles with a large variety of different types of warheads. Activating the Fangs requires a constant draw of power, reducing the amount of energy available to Cee for other purposes, and similarly takes up a significant portion of her secondary processing budget and her Godforge’s capabilities.
Stardazzler Munitions: A form of flashbang technology pioneered by Cee, typically employed in thrown or rocket-driven munitions, though Cee can also generate a burst of Stardazzler light from her Archangel’s Halo at need. Stardazzler flashbangs emit a burst of specialized, ether-saturated light designed to do to supernatural or ‘sixth’ senses what normal flashbangs do to regular sight and hearing. Beyond this wider spectrum of affected senses, Stardazzlers do not possess any other unique characteristics. Cee herself has engineered filters into her own eyes which reduce the effect of close-range exposure to Stardazzler light on herself and largely eliminate distant Stardazzler bursts’ effect on her.
Migraine Munitions: Electronic warfare systems occasionally used by Cee as a digital smokescreen of sorts, blinding and potentially damaging electronic senses with a constant chaff effect of white noise and savage bursts of electronic distortion. Simple but effective EW ‘screamers’ of the sort commonly used in battles across the cosmos.
Superbubble Munitions: Based on extensive study of Crim El Furaga’s Kijinjiraden, the ‘Sword of Protection’, and its ability to invoke a nigh-impenetrable barrier of holy power. Superbubble munitions are several times removed from the original Kijin; their barriers are perfectly breakable and only last for a few moments at best. Nevertheless, Superbubbles are surprisingly strong for their size and the amount of power invested in them, standing up against far more punishment than most would expect a low-level barrier to take.
