Penny

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

How are we going friends?

De Trop Disgrace: Warhammer Fantasy RP

Emmaline had to admit that she was tempted. She could point the finger at Kasimir and be well out of town before anyone knew the wiser. It would certainly serve the young man right. Her eyes met Kasimir's and flashed with mischief for a moment.

"He haz jist come owt into ze corridor from is rooms," Eleanor declared in ringing tones.

"He could not possibly iv gotten back here in time. He vere's ze sim clothes as earlier and zere is no blood on them," she added. Kasimir was a problem for her, but at the end of the day he was an innocent man. More importantly he was the one man in the castle whom she knew had not had a hand in Oderick's death. That meant if she couldn't get out of the city, he was the one man she might be able to trust.

"There is still the matter of the sword," one of the guardsmen declared, a stubborn set to his jaw.

"I am sure zat monsieur vil clear up an misunderstandings," Eleanor continued, "but ze real killor might still be in ze castle, ve should be searching!"

"Right," the stubborn guard said, nodding his head.

"I'll seal the gates and rouse the garrison," the guard declared, "My Lords and Ladies, by the authority of the count, return to your rooms until we can clear this up!"

The crowd might have resisted the orders of a mere castle guard, but at that moment a squad of armsmen in hastily donned gear came clattering down the hallway, forcing nobles back into their rooms at risk of being trampled. Eleanor tried to flatten herself against the wall to allow them to pass, but the effort was rendered moot.

"The pair of you will come with us," their leader declared, politely but firmly. "I'm sure the Chancellor will have questions for you both."

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

HOw are we doing team?

Cinnabar Forever! (RCN)

Cool air rushed in to fill Sabatine’s hard suit as she wrenched her helmet off. The airlock hadn’t yet come to full pressure and the partial vaucumn plucked at her sinuses. The sweat that slicked her body immediately chilled and became clammy, but it was a blessed relief compared to the heat she had generated in nearly two full watches on the hull. The rest of the crew were doing the same, faces red and flushed from hours of heavy labor in zero-g. Cockburn, a landsman groaned and cradled his arm where a parting line had stuck it. It was probably broken, but he was lucky enough not to have lost it when the woven beryllium monocyrstal was suddenly pulled beyond its tensile strength. A few hours in the autodoc would see him healed enough for light duty.

Kaiden’s plan called for the K-21 to be re-rigged and several of her masts stepped to new rings beside. It was a huge undertaking without a dock yard, and only possible at all because they had stripped every spare sail and cable from the Whitehall. That hadn’t pleased Rachet, but he had grudgingly complied. It had pleased the sallow faced lieutenant even less when Kaiden had taken nearly two thirds of his crew, a third to help Sabatine with the repairs to K-21 and the other third to reinforce the Vickie for the next phase of the operation. Even if everything went completely according to plan, all three ships were going to be running with near skeleton crews if and when they got into action with the Alliance. To Sabatine’s personal annoyance, Kadien had left her with a grand total of two petty officers, Klave the Bosun’s mate, and Creavy the Whitehall’s chief engineer. The rest of her crew consisted of six riggers and a score of landsmen who didn’t know a cable splice from their assholes. All the experience spacers were doing yeoman’s work to stop the clumsy landsmen from killing themselves, or worse.

“You should get some sleep ma’am,” Klave suggested as they sucked in lungfuls of reprocessed air.

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” Sabatine responded, her mind running through the next hour and the myriad tasks she needed to accomplish.

“Begging your pardon ma’am, but we might be all be dead if the Alliance jumps in here and you are too exhausted to function. You are the only astrogater we have on board. Sabatine rubbed her eyes with her balled fist. The shortage of astrogaters was a real problem. Kaiden had taken Lieutenant Rachet with him for the next stage of the plan but she wasn’t all together sure that had been the right decision.

“Right,” Sabtine responded noncommittally, “good thought.” The airlock came to pressure and one of the landsmen, Gautso?, spun the dogs and opened the door. Sabatine made a gesture to the man helping half carrying Cockburn to enter first, and he lugged his moaning mate out of the lock. Sabatine followed along till they reached the autodock. The destroyer had a larger unit than the Vickie did, with four independent pods. Sabatine helped Cockburn into the first pod and closed it with a hiss, then finished stripping off her suit and climbed into another. It sealed around her with a crackle and she felt the spray of antistetic preparatory to the placement of IV access. Twenty minutes later she awoke as the pod opened, feeling much better now that the machine had purged her blood stream of metabolites and toxins built up from too much work and not enough sleep. It was an old academy trick, the kind that would get you running laps with a hundred kilo pack if the instructors ever caught you. She stopped by her cabin for a change of clothes and a restorative tot of brandy before heading down to the power room to see how Creavy was getting on with the ships internal systems. After that, if all went well, she could squeeze in two hours sleep before she needed to be back out on the hull.

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

@PerfectThought Thank you for your kind words! You are welcome to submit a charcter sheet but there are a number of other people who are on the waiting list.

De Trop Disgrace: Warhammer Fantasy RP

Emmaline bit back a scream of frustration as she realized she had just collided with the boorish bastard from the ball. All she had needed to do was get to her rooms and she could have gathered up her gold and been out of town before anyone discovered Oderick's body. There would have been time for her to get away in the confusion, while people wondered if she had been abducted for ransom or murdered alongside her beau. Now that Kasimir had seen her suspicion would immediately fall on the foreigner even before she reached the gates of the Ulricberg. Briefly she considered killing Kasimir. The thought made her queasy. She was many things, but she wasn't the sort to murder someone just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She only had one card to play.

"Murder!" she screamed at a shattering volume that shook dust from the ceiling.

"Sieur Oderick has been mirdered!" she howled, "helep! Zanyone!"

Doors flew open as guests stumbled from their quarters. After a moment the shout was taken up by another throat, then another. Within moments, two heavy set men in the Count's livery were forcing there way through the increasingly crowded hallway. Eleanor threw herself into the arms of the nearest weeping hysterically. The second man shoved passed disappearing down the hallway and into Oderick's rooms. A minute later he returned clutching Kasimir's bloody sword. Emmaline didn't hear where the voice called from, but someone shouted Kasimir's name, the guard who had been holding her shoved her aside and drew his weapon as several armed men converged on the luckless nobleman.

Pirates - Ye Be Warned

"Easy all," Jess cried as the boat neared the white spit of sand. The boat crew lifted their oars skyward and allowed the little craft to coast into a soft crunch against the sand. Jess hopped over the side, taking the coil of painter cable over her shoulder as she splashed through the thigh deep water and up onto the beach. The sand was soft and very white, idyllic in all respects. The jungle beyond was a brilliant green and echoed with bird calls and the chittering of less identifiable creatures. Jess trudged up the beach and looped the cable around the trunk of a tree that looked like a palm, save for odd discolored diamond patterns in its bark.

"Do you have a plan here or is it just a 'look for treasure' type thing," Galt asked, having stayed on the boat until the crew pulled it ashore to avoid getting his feet wet. Jess made a gesture with her head to the small peak that formed the central spire of the island, its crest peeking out through the lush jungle.

"The crew will look for fresh water, while you and I will head inland and try to climb that peak, hopefully I can get some sense of where we are from the top," she explained. Her tone wasn't hopeful, Shimmersea was a strange place and only a tiny portion of it had been mapped, an even smaller portion of it reliably.

"And we kind of take look for treasure as a given in this outfit," she concluded.

Pax Astra

The assault boat roared away from the farm burning farmstead at several hundred kilometers per hour, driven onwards by its trio of ion thrusters at full output. There was no need for such haste, but aggressively pushing an advantage was beaten into legionaries from the earliest days of basic training. Sabatine flew a nape of the earth pattern, also completely unnecessary given the lack of any anti-aircraft capabilities beyond rifles. Her face, illuminated by the holographic HUD being projected onto it, seemed to shift, the farmer retreating to be replaced by an older and harder visage. Within moments Cereys was gone, replaced by Athena.

"Thirty seconds to target," Sabatine reported mechanically. Tiber had already left the gunnery station and was readying his personal weapons, snugging pouches and equipment in a familiar, if lately unpracticed, routine. The assault boat screamed in over the village, shattering windows with its down draft as Sabatine executed a stomach churning turn before setting down in the town square. The approach was deliberately too fast, prompting the chemical boosters to fire to slow the decent at the last moment. The old assault landing trick blasted grit and gravel out in all directions like a fragmentation warhead a moment before the boat crunched down on its skids. Sabatine slapped the hatch release and the rear landing hatch crashed to the ground bringing with it a could of dust that mingled with the bleach smell of the cleaning products they had used to get rid of the marine life. She stood up and took her gladius, racking the mechanism to ensure a fresh round was chambered and ready to go. Tiber was already down the ramp, his helmet on and visor down against the dust. Sabatine followed, feeling the tingle of ions from the engines arcing little sparks of heat lightning in the dust. The ramp retracted and sealed. Normally, an assault boat of this type would be defended from enemy infantry by a quartet of 3mm hypersonic gatling guns, but even the remarkable resilience of the craft hadn't spared ammunition in exterior pods from the ruinous effects of sea water. Sabatine doubted it would be a problem, the locals lacking the ordnance or time to force their way into the craft. If the did manage it, well they would burn that bridge when they got to it.

Tiber was already striding towards their target a large pilastered building which had once been a library but now served as Chieftain Gorm's treasure house. Two guards, slovenly dressed thugs with shotguns, were shielding their eyes from the downdraft when Tiber came out of the dust at a fast walk.

"Hey! What are you..." the first one asked, spitting a cigarette from his lips as his eyes widened. Tiber shot him twice, once in the chest, and once in the face in a classic spec ops doubletap. The second guard's eyes bulged a moment before his face exploded from Tiber's third round. He didn't bother with the doubletap this time. Both men were dead before the cigarette hit the ground. He slung his weapon and grabbed the door of the library. Uncharacteristically it was locked, more effort than the local thugs were usually capable of. Somewhere an alarm siren began to blare. Tiber stepped back, racked his weapon and fired. A brilliant bottle shaped blast blossomed from an underslung attachment of some sort and the door, wood veneer around a steel core, flew from its hinges with a scream of warping metal. He had neutralized the guards and breached the door within the few seconds it took Sabatine to catch up, her weapon questing across a landscape now devoid of targets.

"Clear," Tiber reported, sliding the nearly full magazine from his weapon and replacing it with a fresh one.

"Copy that," Sabatine reported, moving through the door with her helmet set to a thirty percent mask of thermal. There were no heat signatures beyond the cooling bodies of guards and their smoldering cigarette butts. The interior of the library was a mess of crates and boxes. Looted artwork, boxes of credit chips, statuary, the assembled loot of decades of drug dealing, prostitution, racketing and other crimes for which there were no names. Sabatine grabbed a hover dolly stacked with jewelry and credit chips and powered it up. For a wonder the mechanism worked and she began to haul the thing back towards the assault boat. Tiber started opening boxes, making a quick inventory of what was most portable and most valuable.

By the time the first thugs arrived, they had made a respectable dent in the loot, piling boxes and crates into troop compartment of the assault boat. Sabatine was tossing a sack of jewelry into the hatch when the first gunshots sparkled off the hull. A group of thugs, apparently the hangers on Gorm kept around as a personal guard, were fanned out across the street, the wiser ones taking cover behind dumpsters and ground cars. Others, often with eyes dilated by whatever drugs had gotten them out of their customary drunken stupors, stood in the open, rocking uneasily.

"Time to go!" Sabatine called to Tiber who was muscling the hover dolly through the shattered doorway. She ducked behind the landing strut and fired twice, dropping one of the drug addled goons in a spray of blood. A vehicle was making its way down the street. The thing had started out as an earth mover with a heavy steel blade, but had been augmented with welded sheets of steel and a trio of pintle mounted automatic slug throwers into an improvised armored car. It chuffed out diesel fumes as it came, brushing stalls of timber and canvas into ruin as it moved too close to the curb. Loud hailers mounted on the cab crackled to staticky life.

"Drop your weapons and I promise to kill you quick," a gravely voice, made worse by static, snarled. Sabatine had never met Chieftan Gorm, but she would have bet her last sesterce that he was the speaker. As if to punctuated the pronouncement, all three automatics opened up in a defeaning roar, kicking up tracks of dust and sparkling ricochets off the hull of the assault boat. Tiber shoved the hover dolly along at a run and then leaped aboard it, the frictionless antigrav gliding across the open space between the library and the assault boat. Bullets struck the boxes around him as he crouched in cover, spraying the street with credit chips and precious gems. The dolly sailed across the street and up the ramp with the precision of a pool ball being slotted home by a master.

"Very well since you choose to die..." the voice snarled. Sabatine pulled a stubby metal cylinder with a blue band around the top and struck the igniter live against the landing strut.

"Ave imperatrix! she shouted, and then tossed the cylinder through the open door into the library. It was doubtful Gorm or his thugs saw the missile in the dust and gunfire but its effect was unmistakable. The plasma grenade was a separated solution of liquid crystal compounds that fused together into a solid microseconds before smaller explosive charges compressed the newly formed lattice in a psudeo-nuclear explosion. There was a flash of bright blue light that was visible even through the stone wall, literally stunning to the untrained. The cerulean fireball ripped through the library like a devouring star. The walls survived long enough to channel the blast upwards before they shattered outwards in an exploding wall of debris. Sabatine was already halfway up the ramp when the concussion knocked her from her feet, driving her up the ramp and slamming her into a bulkhead with force enough to cripple an unarmored man. As it was her armor drove into her at half a dozen points hard enough to leave bruises in the days to come. Behind her the library and loot of Chieftan Gorm was a foretaste of Hades. At the temperature of crystal plasma everything burned. There was no orange, wood and other organics vaporizing in a heart beat, but rather the brilliant white of blazing sandstone, highlighted by the gorgoues red and green of burning metals. Several of the thugs that had been in the street fled burning, their clothing ignited by the terrifying intensity of the blast. Everything Gorm had worked for was gone in a heartbeat, his empire bankrupted, his hold over his men gone. After a debacle like this, he was unlikely to live out the week.

The heat beat at Sabatine like a hammer for the few seconds it took the powerful hydraulics to snap the landing hatch closed. Tiber grabbed her by the shoulder and half carried, half through her over the mess of boxes and crates into the pilots compartment. She cursed and groaned as she stumbled into the pilot's seat. She slapped a preplanned take off sequence and the chemical lifters roared, flaring the blaze behind them deep into the blue spectrum as oxygen was supplied at the pressure of a jet stream. The assault boat leaped skyward, jolting again as the ion thrusters lit, blasting them skyward away from the inferno below. Tiber was in the gunnery station but they were already beyond effective line of site of the settlement, though the glow of fires spreading from the library could be seen on the horizon.

"Going up," Sabatine said, lifting her visor to accept the projection of the HUD and angling the assault boat up and towards open space beyond.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

"Sayeeda makes all the decisions, I suppose that is true to type," Miranda observed smarmily picking at her food. Madge had subsided under the combined glare of most of the adults and didn't seem willing to press her luck any further. Junebug continued to eat, clearly making an effort to slow her pace to something that might be considered civilized. Her normal custom was to shovel food into her mouth as fast as possible, a practice learned via eating on the move and made worse by the demands of Terran bio-augments which sharply increased her metabolism.

"We are co-owners of the Highlander," Sayeeda clarified, "but in battle there can only be one Captain... and her hot pilot boyfriend." Taya sprayed a mouthful of water out of her nose, shocked by the uncharacteristic outburst. Miranda flushed and Brahm and Farah both chuckled, somewhat reluctantly in the laters case. Conversation turned to more local matters, accounts of what this or that acquaintance had been up to since last she visited. Sayeeda reacted only when directly questioned, merely nodding along in a disingenuous counterfeit of interest.

Finally dinner broke up and the robotic servant began to clear up. Madge was off like a shot, vanishing into the hedge ahead of the chiding calls of her parents. Sayeeda beckoned Neil over and headed out through a side door and down the hall to a spacious room. She pushed the door open and grinned.

"They still haven't changed it," she reported, her tone leaving her opinion of this uncertain. The inside of the room was plain, spared from being spartan by a variety of sporting trophies and a number of model starships against one wall. A writing desk with an integral console sat in dusty disuse and a comfortable and neatly made bed was against a wall looking out over a balcony that overlooked the neatly landscaped ground. Junebug crossed to the bed and bend down, rummaging beneath it. She came out with a battered military helmet with a polarized face plate and a silver flask. She unscrewed the cap and took a drink.

"What do you think of the old billet?" she asked, flopping back onto the bed, cradling the helmet under one arm.

Grim Galaxy: Shots and Chances

Conversation as interrupted as the same robotic servant that had unloaded the luggage entered bearing platters of food which it laid carefully on the table. Tomaz excused himself and returned a minute later with Madge, the girl having been somewhat cleaned but still with a stray leaf or two in her thick red hair. She took a seat at the end of the table and began to pick pieces of fruit out of a bowl of salad to Miranda's evident mortification.

"Mom says you killed a lot of people," Madge said around a mouthful of crunchy green apple, "is that true?" There was an audible intake a breath at the blunt question but Sayeeda only snickered.

"Yes, that is true," she admitted gravely.

"Are you going to kill anyone here?" Madge pressed on, blissfully unaware of the mood she was inspiring.

"That shouldn't be necessary," Sayeeda responded diplomatically. Madge frowned in evident disappointment.

"What if they shoot at you?" the girl pressed on.

"Well in that case it would be necessary... so yes," Sayeeda said. Taya, Neil and Brahm all laughed, the later covering his mouth at the glare he received from his wife and younger daughter. Farah opened her mouth to steer the conversation back to safer ground but Madge was not to be deterred.

"Why do you look younger than Mom? Aren't you old?" Madge asked. Farah sighed and Miranda and Tomaz both flushed with embarrassment. There was some truth in the observation, despite being nearly four years older than Miranda, Junebug looked as though she were in her late twenties, rather than her sideral age which was closer to forty.

"Well Madge," Sayeeda responded, ignoring the mouthed 'Margaret' from her sister, "I spend a lot of time in space going very fast which makes time go slower for me."

"Also she spent three years as a popsicle in a cryo pod," Neil interjected, a mischievous glint in his eyes. Madge made a 'whoa' sound which finally gave her mother the chance to reassert control of the conversation.

"I don't imagine you are staying on Celandine very long?" Miranda asked hopefully. Junebug shrugged, a little bemused at the combination of the familiar and the bizarre. Family life like this was alien to her experience and made her uncomfortable in a way she couldn't really define. She had felt this way when she had first come home on leave after five years in the Armored. Fortunately, the sense of alienation she had felt then was attenuated by the presence of Neil and Taya who reminded her she wasn't alone among civilians.

"A couple of days," Junebug responded, "I'm still waiting for exact times and quotes from the dockyard to repair our ship." Madge immediately began asking questions about the Highlander, an odd combination of the charmingly naive and the very well informed.

"You will stay with us of course," Brham declared, "Your room is still pretty much made up, we will have it aired out for you."