Ramzam

The Fillydelphia Post (Ramzam & ladyonyx04)

“I don’t think she even knew I was in town,” Snapshot mumbled as he gravitated to the corner of a nearby building. “We hadn’t actually talked much beyond a couple letters since she left Los Pegasus, y’know?” As though on cue, Snapshot’s, ‘friend,’ glided down to the two news ponies, a broad smile on her face.

“Well, if it isn’t Tinker Time and company!” the sky blue and orange mare shouted as she skidded to a halt in front of Snapshot.

“Hey, Griddle,” he sighed. Griddle simply grinned and looked between Snapshot and Spring Tales and her eyes grew more and more pointed as she repeated the motion. Snapshot waited until she opened her mouth to push his hoof into it. “Spring, meet Griddle. We go back.” In the midst of Snapshot’s introductions, Griddle found the strength to remove his hoof from her mouth.

“Blegh! Yeah,” she deadpanned, “A thousand bits back. Are you ever gonna—“

“Yes! I’ll pay you.” Snapshot sighed. “As soon as I get the money. That’s why I found you, it’s a slow day and we gotta impress the boss.” Griddle’s face lit up with realization.

“Oh! So you’re her sidekick?” she asked as she pointed to Spring. “Rich. Anyway, Spring—what’re you lookin’ for?”

GEARS - Mecha Sci-fi with Anthro characters. RP in a detailed, story-driven world.

Adrian sat for a moment as the gears turned in his head. He played with the scope of his rifle in half successful attempt to peer into the darkness. Rocks. Not sure what I expected. He sucked on his teeth as he willed the L-68 to lower its rifle. “No, you stay back here and cover me,” he said as he turned around to scan the horizon behind the team. He stowed his rifle on his back and withdrew his pistol from its holding clamps. “I’m gonna go smash my face against a landmine or two.”

The L-68 inched out of cover on its skates and loosely circled the perimeter of the mine’s entrance. It stopped at regular intervals to scan the ground in front of it as Adrian made notes of his path. By all appearances, they just picked the good stuff and moved on. He eventually reached the open mouth of the mine. But this place probably looks like a great hangar, doesn’t it? Adrian manually widened the aperture of the L-68’s camera array and peered into the darkness. The picture was much clearer than what his rifle’s camera had shown.

From the entrance, the mine extended some ways as a straight tunnel into the earth, before it broke off into an array of intersections. Adrian turned back to his teammate and signaled, [One minute,] before he slowly advanced into the darkness. It quickly became apparent to him that the mine had seen recent use. Fresh tracks from the skates and feet of GEARS marked a clear path down the center of the entryway, with any junk that had obstructed the flow of traffic pushed against the walls. There were definite efforts to patch up the crumbling, unstable, badlands rock that lined the tunnel, but some had clearly fallen loose. “That’s, that’s very reassuring.”

Adrian had not moved very far when one of the poorly applied, metal plates that had been drilled into the ceiling came loose and fell to the ground in front of him. Thunk! A rock bounced off the head of his GEAR and Adrian threw himself against the back of his seat. The L-68 flew backward on its skates as though it was carried by its pilot’s momentum as a slightly larger rock tumbled to the ground where it had been. The GEAR burst back into the outside light with a trail of dust behind it. Adrian never missed a beat in his retreat as he retraced his path back to the hill and signaled, [No go,] the whole way.

“The place is falling apart,” Adrian said to Aidan after he collected himself. “But it looks like this is where they hid their mech units. So there’s that. If we’re going in, we need to find another entrance. Preferably one that won’t collapse at a moment’s notice.”

The Fillydelphia Post (Ramzam & ladyonyx04)

“I get it, I get it,” Snapshot said, bobbing his head as he and Spring continued on, “Traveling alone as a ground pounder must not be very convenient, huh? There’s a lot less to worry about when you can just fly wherever in a day’s time.” In an intersection, Snapshot flew up high to look down at the city. The port of Fillydelphia was an impressive sight from above, although Snapshot had nothing for comparison. His eyes tracked down the signature—or rather lack of signature—of a dockworker as they flew from crate to crate with a clipboard clutched between their hooves. The mare glanced up at him and mouthed, “five minutes,” before she returned to her work. In the sea of emotional candles, Snapshot looked down at where Spring stood, gauging her for what might have been the first time that day. She at least seemed to like him, he determined from the hints of happiness he picked up. Either that or she’s just a cheery pony, he thought as he landed beside her.

“She’s working right now, but she’ll find us as soon as she’s off the hook,” Snapshot said to Spring as he looked around the intersection for a place to wait and be out of the way, “Shouldn’t be too long, though.”

GEARS - Mecha Sci-fi with Anthro characters. RP in a detailed, story-driven world.

“Alright, Doc, you heard the man—let’s shake a leg,” Adrian said as he fiddled with one of his auxiliary screens, not satisfied to check his map of the area just once. He marveled at how his squad’s radio became less and less effective the further they all went, but not from a lack of experience. He had dealt with the, ‘The Terrors of Magnetic Hell,’ in the past, but it was rarely ever not a tense, stressful situation, even in a squad as tightly knight as the Long Patrol was. The enforced quiet of laser and gestures steadily brought out the worst in him, as he was left alone with his thoughts. I’ve killed a lot of people. His thoughts began to wander. What does chicken taste like? I haven’t eaten lean in millennia, it’s kind of gross. Maybe if I had somebody shred it up and press it into a patty to make a chicken burger— His errant thoughts were repeatedly cut off as his eyes or ears picked up small bursts of activity. He would quickly snap alert, only to find he had been startled by a small tree’s branches in the wind. He sighed and checked over his shoulder. I wonder, is he a surgeon? How many corpses has he felt up? I dealt with a lot of those, back at the slaughter camp… They were all slimy and slippery though, from whatever brine they used to wash the blood away. Man, I remember this one— Adrian returned to attention as his waypoint drew near. The mine, unsurprisingly, was set among a small cluster of hills, which he and Aidan had just come to.

His GEAR signaled back [wait] as he hit the brakes and rolled to a stop at the base of one particularly abrupt incline. He checked left and right, on the lookout for scouts, before he inched up the hill, his rifle held up high. As a fire position, this was well below the standards of what counted as optimal, but through use of the scope’s camera feed into his cockpit, he was able to peek over the crest of the hill without exposing much, if any, of his GEAR to the other side.

GEARS - Mecha Sci-fi with Anthro characters. RP in a detailed, story-driven world.

Gonna post sometime later today.

GEARS - Mecha Sci-fi with Anthro characters. RP in a detailed, story-driven world.

I'm trying to remember whether or not I ever got strep throat.

If I did, I'd say it's on par with that one time I bruised my tailbone and saw that some stranger's clip of me rekking myself got honorable mention on AFV. I stopped watching AFV after that.

The Fillydelphia Post (Ramzam & ladyonyx04)

Snapshot looked up and scanned the sign that hung from the awning over the front door. Sweetie Sweets Sweets. Cute. His eyes flicked over to Spring as he drew his lips in. Stupid name notwithstanding, she likes the apple tarts. The look of deep thought faded away as he archived the information in his mental files and took a few steps in the direction the two were headed before their stop. “Maybe we can get some on the way back… Have you ever been down south?”

The Fillydelphia Post (Ramzam & ladyonyx04)

“I suppose so,” Snapshot said as he searched through one of his saddlebags. “Don’t worry about the bill; this place was my suggestion, after all.” After a another moment of feeling around in the slim bag, he produced what he assumed to be the price of their lunch. Whether or not his guess was correct, the smiling pony that had been their waiter didn’t seem to care, as Snapshot paid on their way out.

“Alright, so…” Snapshot looked left and right as he flapped his folded wings. “Last I heard from him, he said he worked somewhere by the docks. Something to do with a warehouse.” He looked back to Spring. “You know where that is? I, sort of…forgot.”

GEARS - Mecha Sci-fi with Anthro characters. RP in a detailed, story-driven world.

Adrian dismissively waved his hand. “This is par for the course on bandit business. They only look tough, because they pick on civvies that’re even worse fighters than they are. Like, sure, one or two might have had some formal training, but picking on lightweights makes them way softer than they think they are. We’ll have to see exactly what things look like once we get on the ground—weatherman’s hardly ever right—then we can decide how to handle it. Hopefully without having to do too much work.” He chuckled and steadied himself against the table as he turned away. “Anyway, it’ll be gotime soon, so I’m gonna make sure everything’s alright in the hangar. Seeya in a bit.” Adrian stopped with one leg still slung over the seat of the bench and looked back at Aidan. “Oh, I probably don’t have to say about how that stuff—”he gestured to the soda can in Aidan’s hand—“Goes clean through you. Just saying, don’t forget, no outhouses in the badlands.” Adrian slipped away and melted into the halls of the cruiser as he traveled to the GEAR bay.

---

“Anything different today?” Adrian asked the crew chief as he set up to scale his GEAR. The buck shook his head.

“After what you did in the past drills, I’m afraid of what might happen if we make you use anything else.” Adrian rolled his eyes as he opened the hatch. “We did give you a few auxiliaries—extra ammo, a little flare launcher, beer keg—“ The mention of alcohol being fitted to his GEAR caught Adrian’s attention well enough that he nearly lost his balance and tumbled to the bay floor.

“What?” He shouted dumbly as he pulled himself upright and clung onto the edge of the hatch a little tighter than before.

“Care package. For the civvies.” A beat of silence hung over the L-68’s stall before Adrian spoke again.

“There’d better not be—“

“The extra ammo offset your GEAR, so we put a small tank of water on the other side as ballast,” The crew chief explained, placating Adrian enough that he could slip into the cockpit of his GEAR and run his startup checks as the crew cleared away.

“You didn’t really just…?” One of the technicians whispered to the chief.
“For a second there, I thought he was gunna have me take it off.”
“Isn’t there a regulation against that? Anything?”
“Regulation, shmegulation.”

The Fillydelphia Post (Ramzam & ladyonyx04)

Snapshot breathed out a slow, “Huh,” before he shoved the rest of his sandwich down his mouth. “Guess I should go meet up with th’ good ol’ boys later today,” he mumbled as he sloshed the water in his half empty glass around in a circle. With how many of the others there are in a city like this, I could probably find us some interesting work… He held the glass between his hooves and took a long swig of the rather sweet water. “Maybe I could convince ‘em to cut a couple friends a break every now and then,” he chuckled, “Y’know? If there isn’t anything too pressing, I think I know where they hang out…fair warning, they’re kinda…” Snapshot’s eyes darted back and forth as he attempted to describe his brethren. I should’ve put more thought into this. “Well, they’re a buncha ne’er-do-wells, let’s leave it at that.”