Maquina

TZDL2017 Rules/Signups/Updates

I'm getting information from Enki, who's expressed frustration with the process. Wherever that frustration is coming from on his end, I don't know. All I've seen are snippets here and there of PMs he's received.

i'd like to think it's obvious at this point that I'm not here to stir up shit. I'm simply doing my job as the front man for my group. Enki's having a rough time of it lately and not just here, so I figured I'd step in and explain, take a load off of him. That's what I do for my buddies. I'm not trying to piss in your coffee or spy on your clubhouse or whatever, I'm trying to help a buddy of mine have some fun here.

Can we agree on that?

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

La Maquina's thoughts are her own, not necessarily mine. That's the way she is with everybody, and how my writing sounds in her voice. It's not meant to be aggression on my part, though it very much is aggression on her part. Ultron is not impressing her so far, no. Heh, he's got plenty of opportunity to change that, though!

TZDL2017 Rules/Signups/Updates

The back-and-forth and constant sniping has been difficult on a few of us, especially after the Ultron shitstorm.

Enki, like myself, comes from a group of players with a collective storyline and history over fifteen years in the making, where the JRPG elements people keep poking at Enki to clarify, quantify, or cull are accepted as standard parts of the toolkit. They've been grandfathered in by now, and certain players are more steeped in the old traditions than others. I could cull my weapons, Runes, and Materia easily enough; others don't have it quite so fortunate.

I request patience and understanding, if any can be spared. The original Rosa profile is still available if it's requested, but Enki talks to us about the progress he's making over PMs with Mobius, and that progress has been slow and somewhat fraught. Ergo, a less objectionable profile offered to, as they say in Cancoun, "GET IT OVER WITH ALREADY".

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

This guy just didn’t get it.

La Màquina had long since identified the red smoke as some sort of radioactive byproduct; her skin wasn’t fond of it in the least, but she could handle a bit of radiation for a while, especially with her Aura to keep it off of direct contact with her. Now, though? Now radiological readings were spiking, and it didn’t really take a nuclear physicist to figure out what was going on.

Unfortunately for the Robrute…well, he just didn’t get it.

In her current position, Màquina had just about all the advantages. The brute’s greater size and leverage didn’t mean spit in the air, his arms were tangled up with restraining her own and trying to haul her around by the forearms, and his foe had four almost completely unimpeded striking limbs with which to take advantage of their bind. If he wanted to try and spit radioactive glop at her, she’d just make sure it was point elsewhere. The bruiserbot had exactly one neck’s worth of musculature to try and direct his radioactive spew – Màquina had two arms’ worth of musculature with which to direct it elsewhere, and two arms pretty much always beat one neck.

Discarding its anti-armor dirk, allowing the weapon to fade into rapidly dispersing golden dust, La Màquina slammed her upper-right Backhand up under the Robrute’s chin, fingers gripping into any angle or crevice they could find, and twisted hard. Her upper-left Backhand continued to manhandle the brute’s head, forcing his mouth up and to the right, away from her delicate beauty and off into the distance where it could be someone else’s radiological disaster. If the bruiser’s neck was anything like her own she didn’t give herself good odds of actually snapping it, but she was absolutely twisting with enough force and torque to break a Natural’s neck like a charred twig. There was little realistic way the brute would be able to keep his sludge beam strike on target.

As for the Robrute’s attempts to haul her up and into the path of the beam? That would prove just as fruitless. Màquina’s own natural arms resisted the attempt as much as they could; while she couldn’t easily match the much larger machine’s strength of limb, she was by no means weak, and furthermore the leverage she had on the Robrute’s head also allowed her to push down and away from his toxic spew, once again matching four arms’ strength to that of two. That was a no-go.

And worst of all, it left Màquina’s lower Backhands entirely open to continue their work of finding holes to stab anti-armor dirks through. The Robrute was vastly underestimating that threat; La Màquina was not at all just randomly stabbing and hoping to get lucky. Each strike was guided by sensor and target acquisition & analysis systems honed to a razor’s edge of efficiency and sensitivity, driven by myomer muscles with far finer dexterity and control than even the finest and most precise of martial-artsy Naturals. Metal was indeed tough, but mere passive alloy protection was no real protection at all from La Màquina’s questing spikes. It was something of a miracle that she hadn’t already found a weakness sufficient to wedge a spike into. If the Robrute continued to ignore her stabbings, he would regret it in extremely short order.

What he didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that La Màquina’s Forged constructs, the weapons her Diablo’s Foundry yielded to her, could be willed back into their raw energy states – violently. Any time Màquina wished. She was stabbing at the big bruiser with armor-piercing sticks of dynamite – and he was letting her. One good penetration was all she needed – even if that stab didn’t hit anything vital or even particularly important, the ensuing explosion inside the Robrute’s armor, turning all that toughened metal against her foe and using it to contain her own attack inside his vulnerable internal systems, would absolutely hit something important.

As for the warbot’s attempt to run her into the Ring’s plasma ropes, or whatever else he had in mind? That was easily enough dealt with – neither combatant had full control of their mutual flight. La Màquina’s Halo-driven levitation fought the Robrute’s rocket-driven thrusters, with the result that neither android could force the other onto a steady, desired course. For La Màquina, that was fine – she was doing perfectly well on her own and only needed to exert her flight systems against the Robrute’s to stop them from crashing into anything. The Robrute, on the other hand, needed to try and actively steer the pair into whatever obstacles he wished to make use of, which Màquina could screw with at will. All she needed to do was aim at all of the places up in the air where there wasn’t anything to crash into – her foe needed to try and find a way to overcome her interference long enough to actively target a place to be. She tried to guide the fight in a rough circle around the central Ring, keeping them within the bounds of the fight, but she wasn’t terribly worried about it so long as she could keep the charge from landing them in trouble. And she could.

This brute was either dumb as a bag of New Arizona rocks or he was severely underestimating La Màquina. She was fine with either version. She liked being underestimated – she loved the look of horrified shock on the faces of enemies who thought she was an easy win when they found themselves under her heel, watching in helpless fear as the Thousand Executions built itself above them. And if this guy was just that dumb?

Then it was her job as a custodian of synthetic society to ensure that his schematics were scrubbed from the database before any more resources were wasted on new Robrutes.

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

Robrute reacted with the cool aplomb expected of a fellow synthetic, managing to countergrab La Màquina's arms in an attempt to pull her up into a nasty iron-plated headbutt. Not bad...but not good enough.

The maneuver didn't interfere with the formation of La Màquina's Backhands at all, as she'd started manufacturing them well before the mutual grab and they were one of her quickest and most oft-refined and practiced Forgings. Her planned barrage of punches morphed instead into a block, her upper-left Backhand slapping a palm in front of the headbutt and arresting its force. There wasn't enough muscle in Robrute's neck for him to get the leverage needed to knock noggins with La Màquina with the intervening arm in the way, and that left three free Backhands to get up to mischief with.

The boosters came online, Robrute threatening to take La Màquina for a rippin' rocket ride across the ground, but the big bruiserbot wasn't the only one in this match with the ability to defy gravity. La Màquina's Fallen Angel's Halo snapped open, its broad argent ring and mantling cluster of six techno-angel's blade-feathered wings appearing above Màquina's head, only just barely clearing the Robrute's own. Her own flight disrupted and struggled against the rocket boosters, adding momentum to force their flight upwards and away from the ground as well as backwards, leaving them spiraling through the air with hard grips on each other's arms. Well, some of each other's arms.

La Màquina's three free limbs each curled their fingers around the grips of flash-Forged spike-bladed dirks, plucking the weapons out of the aether in a heartbeat and searching for vulnerable joints. The Robrute's armor appeared to be phenomenally tough, but it was still conventional armor. Not Màquina's own combination of kinetic spreader and ethereal hardening, simply big burly plates of metal and less burly weaves between them. Those joints were the targets of Màquina's sudden flurry of stabs – the upper-right Backhand plunged its dagger down into chinks in the Robrute's neck, seeking vulnerable points with a hardened needle point and the surreal precision of Màquina's synthetic targeting systems and flawless control.

The lower two backhands went for armpits, hips, chinks in the main body armor, anything they could get to, driving with tremendous force and unerring precision into any likely weak point, probing hard for weaknesses. They were free to do so; until either Màquina or Robrute relented in their grip, the two were too close for anything else.

Unless the bruiser had more tricks than La Màquina, of course. But in all her experiences within the Alliance and without, one thing had always remained true for the masked warrior – nobody had more tricks than La Màquina.

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

Unimportant. If I could change my name here I would.

Also: La Maquina's human appearance is literally only skin deep. if Ultron has any sort of detection capability he could easily tell she's a synthetic.

Also Mk. II: Maquina's attempted grip was just beneath the elbow, not anywhere near the wrist. I'm rolling with it, but in the future please take better note of precise descriptions. They're important in close scrums like this.

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

The Code of Glorious Conduct had been satisfied. Now, La Màquina was free to rampage.

Her foe was barreling towards her, right fist cocked back, for quite possibly the most telegraphed haymaker in Luchalliance history. It seemed the red-smirking Creep-o-tron was trying to use the painfully obvious punch to disguise his dispersal of both a distortion-like wave of sorts and some manner of red mist. Màquina set her systems to work analyzing both phenomena, searching for whatever threat they represented, but in the interim she had a big dumb robrute to discipline.

Discipline would start with one simple lesson – one does not strike a lady. Not unless one is prepared to be struck back sixfold.

La Màquina’s Warrior’s Aura, the loosely-governed cloud of power which surrounded her at all times, would keep the fog and waves off of her long enough for her to figure out what they did and defeat them more properly, but the punch and the robrute it was attached to wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded. That would take some actual work and some pretty precise timing…which was something La Màquina’s synthetic mind was superhumanly good at.

She delayed her reaction, standing there with a sneer on her masked face, until the moment Mr. Robrute committed to his blow…then exploded into motion. Her left arm snaked up and out of its position, her forearm slamming into Robrute’s wrist and deflecting the heavy, easily predicted punch aside. La Màquina’s right leg slid forward, the toe of her boot kicking rubble out of the way as she stepped inside Robrute’s own stride, getting right up close, chest-to-chest. At this range the mechanoid’s reach advantage was thoroughly nullified; he’d have trouble getting any real power behind any blow he could launch at La Màquina. Her left hand turned the deflectional block into a snatch attempt, her hand twisting around to try and lock its fingers onto the mechanoid's arm just below the elbow. Her right arm snaked out to do the same to the Robrute's left, seeking to bind up both his limbs with her own.

And all the while, as she moved and blocked and stepped and grabbed, La Màquina's Diablo's Foundry was working. Behind her, a heavy brace firmly fixed to her back and shoulders snapped into existence, four copies of her own arms sprouting from it on specially gimballed shoulder joints. La Màquina's Backhands – one of her favorite and signature techniques, the ability to grow four extra arms with which to pummel her foes or wield her innumerable array of weapons and stolen techniques. By the time La Màquina had set her feet again after the sliding forward step, bracing herself inside the Robrute's stride, her Backhands had formed and were performing their attack commensurately with Màquina's attempt to bind her foe's arms.

The two uppermost Backhands, positioned behind and above Màquina's natural shoulders, were almost perfectly positioned to rotate upwards and start unleashing a hefty barrage of blows right upside the Robrute's smoke-spewing grill. Hooks, jabs, straights, crosses, all the fisty stuff, fired at superhuman machine gun speed from a variety of angles at the mechanoid's head. Straight at his face, hooking in to either side of his skull, uppercuts to the chin, hammerfists to the dome – La Màquina laid into her enemy with just about everything she could throw at him from her position of advantage inside his reach.

Her lowermost Backhands remained in a wide guard, ready to intercept any reciprocal shenanery the Robrute decided to lay her way, while La Màquina grinned beneath her foe's big fat thoroughly assaulted head. No doubt the big bruiser had expected some sort of slick dodge – he was, after all, much larger and heavier than she was and built on a stocky male frame besides. Fight Logic held that she would be at a sore disadvantage in close.

Fight Logic, La Màquina had found, rarely accounted for one combatant having three times the striking limbs her opponent did. Robrute had miscalculated, and now he was going to have to Pay the Penalty.

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

The things I do when I’m bored…

La Màquina was waiting on a camouflaged shuttle sent prior to the Ring’s arrival by the Masked Dreadnaught. She knew an opponent was coming, and that she had been elected the arbiter of whatever problem there was that needed settling with righteous violence, but she had been told nothing else of importance. The violence part was fine by her – she liked the violence part – but she was starting to seriously doubt that the Alliance was taking her time seriously. She was new, after all, and a part-timer besides.

Oh well. Only one way to show them…and at least she’d get a decent workout out of the deal.

With the arrival of the Ring, and the subsequent appearance of her adversary for this contest, Màquina’s interest sharpened. Another android – and one that made no attempt to play at being anything but a machine of war. Unsheathed metal and glowing power, nothing but armor and attitude…this was a fight of a sort she hadn’t seen since that one robo-godlet thing she’d nearly nuked a couple of years back. Hopefully this one would prove to be a better challenge, but even if it wasn’t, it was always so refreshing to take on a fellow android.

Ensuring her ECM and cyberwarfare systems were spun up and ready to go, La Màquina went to the shuttle’s transporter system and hit the switch to begin the match proper, the way the Luchalliance’s Code of Glorious Conduct demanded.

With a bang.

Terminite: Firepower

La Màquina appeared inside the ring, opposite her opponent and equidistant between the central Ring and the plasma ropes suspended between the Posts, in a burst of golden flame and amidst a fanfare of music, the high-paced beats of her chosen anthem shaking the stone beneath her feet. Clad in her signature white bodysuit and boots, wearing the aggressive red-and-gold mask that was her symbol of status and power within the Luchalliance, she was a vision of wrathful femininity framed in fire. Just over six feet tall on her own, her height had been augmented by the four-inch heels of her utterly impractical boots, and her long, sweeping hair had been tied up high enough to add another inch or two to her normally quite imposing height. Somehow she didn’t think this nigh-eight-foot mechanoid would be impressed. Her hair whipped in the gales thrown off by her own pyrotechnics, explosions and fireworks in the white, gold and red which were her colors staining the sky around her. As her fanfare resounded, she lifted her right arm and stabbed an accusatory finger at her foe as she tipped her head back just enough to glare down her nose at the offending mechanoid.

“You’re the sorry excuse for a crockpot who’s called for Justice?!” Màquina called, allowing a dismissive sneer to color her words. The crowds loved it when she was a bitch, and she was only too happy to oblige. “Phfah! I’ve seen more threatening machines in low-budget video games! You think you have what it takes to bring me down? PATHETIC! When we’re done here I’m going to turn what’s left of you into a pretty little dolly for my collection and perch you on my shelf, next to all the other hopeless fools who made the mistake of stepping into the Ring with me!”

“Now COME ON! Let’s get this over with quickly, I haven’t got all afternoon to waste on you!”

La Màquina’s stance was…less than perfect, defensively. In that she simply crossed her arms over her chest, feet shoulder width apart and planted in the rubble of the Ring’s landing, and glared at her foe. Beneath her skin, combat systems were already spooled up and ready to react, her Fuego de la Orden spun up to combat strength and brimming with readied energies, putting the lie to her haphazard-seeming guard…but Luchalliance tradition dictated that the challenger was afforded the right to strike first.

That was fine by her. First strike didn’t matter for shit. The only strike that truly mattered in a fight like this was the last one, and that strike would be La Màquina’s.

TZDL2017 Rules/Signups/Updates

Okay. Serious talk here for a moment?

Knock it off, LeeRoy. I've got this. You are super not helping.

DLL vs. Metal Tortoise - #LUCHAGAMES

@Metal Tortoise

You are permitted the advantage of posting first. The rules of this match shall mirror those of the TZDL Tournament, as part of your proving, with the exception that touching the ground beyond the 100 square meter enclosure of the Ring shall be counted as a Ring Out, in concordance with the Code of Glorious Conduct.

Show me your power, and let the world see the measure of machine-man you are.